I 



THESE MANY YEARS 



THESE MANY YEARS 

RECOLLECTIONS OF A NEW YORKER 



BY 

BRANDER MATTHEWS 

PROFESSOR OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 

MEMBER OF 

THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1917 






Copyright, 1917, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published October, 1917 




OCT 10 1917 
DC1.A478936 



^M> / 



A 



IN MEMORIAM 

EDWARD MATTHEWS 
1814-1887 

VIRGINIA BRANDER MATTHEWS 
1827-1903 



■■>*.>•<•. 



CONTENTS 

CHA.PTEB PAGE 

I. The Point of View 1 

II. The Parentage of a New Yorker ... 18 

III. Early School-Days 35 

IV. Later School-Days 54 

V. Preparing for College 81 

VI. Undergraduate Days 101 

VII. On the Threshold of the Law .... 133 

VEIL New York in the Early Seventies . . . 158 

IX. Parisian Memories 183 

X. Concerning Clubs 214 

XI. Criticism and Fiction 242 

XII. Early London Memories. I 258 

XIII. Early London Memories. II 286 

XIV. Adventures in Play-Making 318 

XV. Among the Players 345 

XVI. Adventures in Story-Telling 374 

XVII. A Professor of Dramatic Literature . . 391 

XVIII. Later European Memories 414 

XIX. A Sexagenarian Retrospect 438 



THESE MANY YEARS 



THESE MANY YEARS 

CHAPTER I 
THE POINT OF VIEW 



WHEN a man squares himself at his desk 
and for a moment stays his hand from 
the pen while he tries to "squeeze the 
sponge of memory" — to borrow the apt phrase of 
Henry James — when he seeks to recall and to set in 
order his most salient recollections, he finds him- 
self confronted by the duty of making a choice 
between the two kinds of autobiography, loosely 
so called. He must decide whether he will write 
mainly about himself, bringing up to date the log 
of his own lonely voyage thru life, or whether 
he will not talk mainly about others, about his 
fellow-passengers on that Noah's Ark whereon we 
are all of us embarked as it drifts over the endless 
waters. If he shall choose rather to recall what he 
remembers about others than what he remembers 
about himself, the result will be only a book of remi- 
niscences and not a true autobiography. And a 
book of reminiscences, however valuable it may be, 
is necessarily less valuable than a true autobiog- 

1 



2 THESE MANY YEARS 

raphy, since a man can know other men only from 
the outside, whereas he ought to know himself 
from the inside. 

Not only is the true autobiography likely to have 
solider qualities than the book of reminiscences, it 
ought also to be more amusing for its maker; it ought 
to be more fun for him (and therefore to have more 
flavor for those who may read it), because altho 
we may like to gossip about others we dearly love 
to chatter about ourselves. In fact, the only two 
occasions when a man has the privilege of amply 
expressing himself, and of telling what he thinks and 
feels, are when he summons the family physician to 
listen to his self-scrutiny and when he solicits the 
gentle reader to assume the same attitude. A bore 
has been defined as a man who wants to talk about 
himself when you want to talk about yourself. 
Yet even by this condemnatory definition the auto- 
biographer escapes, for when the gentle reader set- 
tles himself under the evening lamp and before the 
wood-fire with a book in his hand, he does not then 
desire to talk about himself, whatever may be his 
wishes at other moments. What the gentle reader 
demands is that the autobiographer shall so talk 
about himself as to make his interest in his personal 
theme more or less contagious — that he shall some- 
how and in some measure transmit to others the 
pleasure he finds in his gossip about himself. "Truly, 
I think," so the candid Sir Walter Scott made one 
of his characters confess, "writing history (one's 
self being the subject) is at any time as amusing 
as reading that of foreign countries." 



THE POINT OF VIEW 3 

The autobiographer may be at fault in thinking 
that he can carry over to the reader any part of the 
delight he has taken in his selfish task; and he may 
even err in thinking that there is any call for the 
telling of his life. Yet even the most insignificant 
and unworthy of autobiographers is after all a 
human being; and the life of any human being has 
its worth and its significance. The superiority of 
autobiography over every other form of biography 
has been asserted by two American authors, neither 
of whom oddly enough left behind him his own 
account of his own career. Longfellow, in one of 
his note-books, asserted playfully that "autobiog- 
raphy is what biography ought to be"; and Holmes, 
in one of his essays, declared that "there are but 
two biographers who can tell the story of a man's 
or a woman's life. One is the person himself or 
herself; the other is the Recording Angel. The 
autobiographer cannot be trusted to tell the whole 
truth, tho he may tell nothing but the truth; and 
the Recording Angel never lets his book out of his 
own hands." 

The whole truth the autobiographer cannot tell for 
many reasons, partly because it is given to no man 
to know the whole truth — especially about him- 
self. His personal equation prevents him from tak- 
ing an absolutely accurate observation of his own 
deeds and of his own moods. The whole truth he 
cannot hope to tell; and perhaps his ambition to 
tell nothing but the truth is as futile. To do this 
may be his sole ambition, yet it is unattainable 
by human infirmity. However honest a man may 



4 THESE MANY YEARS 

be and however little of romanticism lie may have 
in him, he cannot help poetizing his own part, mix- 
ing fancy with his facts, Dichtung with Wahrheit. 
The sponge of memory, even when pressed by 
clean hands, can rarely give us the pure water of 
truth, for the stream that drips from it must be 
more or less muddied by our likes and dislikes, ear- 
lier and later. If we cannot rely on our observation 
of life, how can we put confidence in our memories ? 
The physiologists tell us that a man is made over 
at least once in seven years; and how shall a man 
made over again and again be trusted to recapture 
from one of his vanished selves the fleeting feelings 
of that departed entity? 

"Memory is never purely passive, and therefore 
never absolutely faithful," we were told by Jules 
Lemaitre, that most suggestive of French critics, 
always alert to the world at large, even when he was 
playfully centering his immediate attention on the 
passing shows presented in the minor theaters of 
Paris. "Its activity is constant and not to be 
coerced. At bottom memory is not to be distin- 
guished — except chronologically — from imagina- 
tion, to which it furnishes materials, but materials 
already rehandled and altered. Never do we re- 
member things exactly. Always what we are, what 
we feel at the present moment, modifies in our own 
eyes what we felt and what we were in the past." 

This is uncontrovertible; and it is a warning to 
be heeded by the wary autobiographer. Strive as 
he may, he will err; and he will do well to recognize 
frankly in advance the pitiful fact that the picture 



THE POINT OF VIEW 5 

of life he is about to present cannot avoid a resem- 
blance more or less close to the absurd reflections 
of those convex or concave mirrors which distort 
the faces and the figures of grinning rustics in the 
side-show of the circus. And the more clearly this 
warning rings in the ear of the autobiographer, and 
the more often it checks the momentum of his self- 
confidence, the more likely is he to attain to that 
approximate verity which is the utmost he can 
hope to achieve. He can find a second warning 
in a saying of Mark Twain's, when approaching 
threescore years and ten: "When I was younger I 
could remember anything whether it happened or 
not — but now I'm getting old, and soon I shall re- 
member only the latter." More than once as I 
have evoked the past in preparation for these pages, 
I have recalled events at which I have fondly be- 
lieved myself to have been a spectator, only to dis- 
cover that I was deluding myself by remembering 
what had not happened; and I can only hope that 
I may make this discovery as often as I may be in 
danger of deluding the reader. 

II 

It was, I think, in the first year of the twentieth 
century that a student in the Columbia Law School, 
who was taking a course of mine on the develop- 
ment of modern fiction, asked me to read a short- 
story of his; and when he came back for my criti- 
cism I told him that it was a good enough tale, and 
that it seemed to show his possession of the gift of 



6 THESE MANY YEARS 

narrative, but that it lacked the flavor of individu- 
ality, since it contained nothing to differentiate it 
sharply from other good-enough tales. 

"What do you know," I asked, "that nobody 
else knows ? — or at least that nobody else has 
written about? Every one of us has had experi- 
ences denied to the rest of his fellow men; and this 
is the stuff out of which he can create literature with 
the most likelihood of its interesting the rest of us. 
What have you yourself seen that might be unhack- 
neyed material or atmosphere or background for 
fiction ? " 

"I know the lumber camps of Michigan," was his 
prompt answer. 

"Is the life out there interesting?" I inquired. 

"Very interesting," he responded. 

"Well, then," I went on, "if you have found it 
interesting, so may your readers. Why not write 
about that?" So it was that a few months later 
Mr. Stewart Edward White sent me the 'Blazed 
Trail.' 

And now when I seek to record my own retro- 
spections I must, perforce, put my own question 
to myself. What have I to tell? What have I 
seen that others have not seen? What special ex- 
periences have I had to lend the flavor of individu- 
ality to these recollections of a man of letters? 
Even if the panorama of life, as it has unrolled it- 
self before my gaze for more than threescore years, 
has keenly interested me, what reason have I to 
suppose that my report of it will have any attrac- 
tion for gentle readers? Probably, like any other 



THE POINT OF VIEW 7 

man talking to himself, I am not insistent upon a 
convincing answer to these questions. Yet if I 
must respond to my own interrogatories, I can only 
declare, first, that I have been singularly fortunate 
in my friends and acquaintance, since I have known 
more or less intimately many men who were very 
well worth knowing. Second, I should add that I 
have chanced to be present on more than one occa- 
sion when things happened — things of a certain 
historic interest. Thirdly, and finally, I should 
allege that the angle from which I surveyed these 
things and these men was all my own, since it is 
very unlikely that any other person who may have 
known these men and seen these things regarded 
them from the point of view personal to me. 

This personal point of view was the result of my 
training for an unusual profession; and what made 
my position the more peculiar was that I was never 
permitted to practise this profession for which I 
had been prepared, whereas most of those who have 
practised it do so without the preparation I had 
received to qualify me to exercise it. This pro- 
fession was that of millionaire, a calling less thickly 
populated half a century ago than it is now. For 
this profession I was deliberately educated by my 
father, who was frank in informing me in my youth 
that when I grew up I should not have to earn my 
own living. It was to be my task in life not to 
make money, but to administer an ample fortune, 
and to spend it as it ought to be spent, for my own 
advantage and for public service. My father had 
made the money for me, his only son, and there 



8 THESE MANY YEARS 

would be an abundance of it; and the wherewithal 
being thus provided, it was for me to fulfil the large 
but dimly envisaged ambitions he had formed for 
me. Altho he never clearly stated his hopes, I 
think that they turned in the direction of politics, 
and that he foresaw my entrance into public life, 
very much as tho I were an elder son, heir of an 
ancestral estate in Great Britain, whose place in 
Parliament was duly awaiting his majority. 

To be a millionaire as my father conceived it for 
me was to practise one of the learned professions, 
as necessary to the state as any one of its older 
brethren, medicine or the law or the church. Altho 
my father in those days of my youth was immersed 
in affairs, busily engaged in accumulating wealth 
for my future use, money itself was very rarely a 
topic of conversation in our family circle. As we 
had it, there was no need to talk about it; and it 
was taken as a matter of course. Only when we 
ceased to have it did it begin to bulk bigger in our 
thoughts and in our converse. As a result of this 
reticence, at the time when my father intimated to 
me his expectations for my future, money did not 
have any mysterious attraction for me. The pro- 
fession which my father had chosen for me seemed 
to me not unlike any other; and I scarcely sus- 
pected that it was that one which the immense 
majority of men would most gladly embrace. What- 
ever might be in my boyhood my personal opinion 
of my destined profession, I never had a chance to 
practise it, for my father's fortune began to fade 
away in the very year when I came of age, and it 



THE POINT OF VIEW 9 

vanished finally a decade before my father died, 
leaving for the family needs only the far more mod- 
est inheritance of my mother. 

Altho our change of circumstances had many dis- 
pleasing accompaniments, and altho it forced me to 
face the world for myself, in a fashion that I had 
never foreseen, I believe I can honestly say that I 
have never unduly bewailed the loss of the wealth 
I was to have inherited. It was with ultimate equa- 
nimity that I relinquished any hope of entering the 
profession for which I had been trained. And of 
late I have found myself wondering at times whether 
I should have been any happier or any richer in the' 
things that are worth while had I come into the for- 
tune which had once been my father's. At last I 
have become more and more inclined to the conclu- 
sion that, on the whole, I have been better off with- 
out it. It is true that I might have administered it 
well and that I might have risen to place and power 
in politics; but it is even more probable that I 
might not have been able to withstand the insidious 
temptations and the disintegrating accompaniments 
of wealth not earned by my own efforts. 

I have also wondered frequently whether it was 
an advantage or a disadvantage for me to have 
spent my boyhood in luxurious surroundings, when 
the wealth that supplied them was to shrivel away 
just as I was about to appreciate its possibilities. 
To have had in abundance and then not to have, 
this is a deprivation of accustomed things; and for 
years it made itself felt in a constant sense of loss. 
Many a poor boy has had a hard struggle in his 



10 THESE MANY YEARS 

bare youth, battling almost for life itself, and has 
toiled unceasingly, striving upward until he has 
won a large fortune for his old age; and I have often 
asked myself whether his experience is more satis- 
factory on the whole than mine. I had at least the 
privilege of early initiation, of association from my 
youth up with the well-bred, of living in a home of 
graceful refinement, of profiting by foreign travel in 
childhood and boyhood, of meeting interesting peo- 
ple, authors and artists, of having every opportunity 
for surveying the world in its pleasantest aspects. 
And perhaps I owe to this some part, at least, of 
my incurable cheerfulness, of my tolerant good 
humor, and of my indurated optimism. 

These things have each of them their own value; 
and taken together they may be called a fair com- 
pensation for other things which I have had to sur- 
render. But no one of them, nor all of them to- 
gether, can I deem as important as another benefit 
for which I am more and more grateful as the years 
go by. Wealth, merely as wealth, as money heaped 
up, as a source of luxury and of self-indulgence, has 
never had for me any glamor. Of course, it would 
be inept not to conceive of money as a good thing 
to have; but it never appeared to me as other 
than one of the many good things that fate may or 
may not have bestowed upon any one of us. A 
great fortune, or what was so accounted half a cen- 
tury ago, had been a possession of mine, at least in 
immediate expectation; and all unthinking I had 
enjoyed the benefit of it. In consequence, I have 
never been awed by wealth, or even greatly im- 



THE POINT OF VIEW 11 

pressed by it, having no temptation to worship it 
inordinately, even if I retain a full understanding 
of its value as a lubricant for the machinery of life. 



Ill 

A few years ago, half-a-dozen or half-a-score, up 
in the sunny smoking-room only recently built on 
the roof of the Athenaeum in London, and on a 
lovely summer afternoon, I had an illuminating con- 
versation that comes back to me now as I write. 
That keen explorer of nature and art and life, Sir 
Martin Conway, in the course of our wandering 
talk about men and things, was unexpectedly moved 
to develop what struck me at first as only a clever 
but abhorrent paradox, until his clear exposition at 
last almost carried conviction. His startling con- 
tention was that the ultimate strength of Great 
Britain, her march forward in peace and in war, 
her unparalleled ability to administer a stupendous 
empire, her unexampled power of ruling alien de- 
pendencies, in fact, all her acknowledged superiori- 
ties, were the direct result of a single principle, a 
principle which the British alone among their Euro- 
pean rivals had preserved, and which we Americans 
had never allowed to be established. This was the 
principle of primogeniture, by which the great es- 
tates passed entire to the eldest son, cutting off the 
younger sons to fend for themselves. 

As Conway proceeded to expound this unaccepta- 
ble theory, I slowly realized the force of the French 
wit's assertion that "a paradox is often only a truth 



12 THESE MANY YEARS 

serving its apprenticeship." He began by admitting 
the apparent unfairness of refusing their equal share 
to the younger sons, but he maintained that this 
unfairness was but apparent, since it deprived them 
only of money while giving them what was far 
better than money. He insisted that they actually 
had the best of it, since what is really best for any 
man is not that he should have his path made 
smooth for him by the enervating inheritance of 
unearned wealth, but that he should receive the 
rich training which would fit him most adequately 
for making his own way in the world when he is 
finally cast on his own resources; that he should 
know from the first the necessity he will be under to 
fend for himself, so that he will at the start have 
every incentive to profit by his ample educational 
opportunities; and then finally that he should be 
forced "to fight for his own hand," assured in ad- 
vance of the influential support of the head of the 
family, the elder son who is the only one of the lot 
to be laden with the heavy responsibility of keeping 
up appearances, and who is the only one to be cursed 
with unearned wealth. 

Conway pointed out that this assured to the 
younger sons the "career open to the talents," 
which the French Revolution proclaimed, open in 
England not to all the talents as the French had 
demanded, but only to a strictly selected group, 
limited to the class which had been proved to pos- 
sess a hereditary gift for leadership. My brilliant 
friend had no difficulty in adducing a host of illus- 
trations, including, of course, the most obvious and 



THE POINT OF VIEW 13 

the most illustrious — Wellington. As he devel- 
oped his paradox it began slowly to take on the at- 
tributes of an unrecognized truth, incomplete in its 
application, no doubt, but demanding considera- 
tion. And I could not refrain from silently making 
a personal application to myself. I was not a 
younger son; in fact, I was an only son; yet I had 
had every educational opportunity, even if I had not 
improved these as amply as the younger sons in 
England who had gone forth to win fame and for- 
tune for themselves. That I had not profited as 
wisely or as fully as I might by my earlier advan- 
tages, was perhaps because I had not the warning 
they received almost in the cradle that the luxury 
which surrounded and supported them, and supplied 
the preparation for self-advancement was never to 
be theirs. 



IV 

Altho I do not now feel any keen disappointment 
at my failure to come into the fortune my father 
hoped to bequeath to me, and altho I believe my- 
self to be amply reconciled to the state of life in 
which I find myself to-day, I am forced to confess 
to a disappointment of a totally different kind, due 
to my failure to attain what was a very early object 
of ambition. In spite of my placid expectation 
of wealth, what I most vigorously desired in my 
youth was not the leisure and the luxury, or even 
the position in public life wherein my father placed 
me in his forecasting aspirations. Indeed, I doubt 



14 THESE MANY YEARS 

if I ever adequately appreciated the possibilities of 
the career planned for me, or if that career really 
appealed to me, forever dangling itself before me as 
a prize to be won by hard labor. To politics I felt 
little attraction, even when I chanced to give it a 
thought; but I did not often let my mind play with 
it, since public life seemed to me far in the future, 
and in a way unreal. It had no power to excite me, 
ignorant as I was of its allurements. 

What had the power to excite me was the theater; 
and its allurements were immediate and genuine. 
I did not want to act; I wanted to write plays for 
others to act. That was the goal where my wander- 
ing thoughts tended to direct themselves when I 
was an undergraduate and a law student. I made 
no effort to reconcile this wish for the practice of 
stage-craft with the possession of wealth; indeed, I 
do not believe that I ever got so far as to consider 
play -writing as a profession, or to weigh its pecuniary 
rewards; I simply wanted to write plays, for the 
sheer delight of writing them, without thought of 
fortune or fame, and without being conscious of 
any pent-up emotions within me demanding expres- 
sion in dialog and in action. I had no surging 
sentiments; I did not need money; and as for 
winning a reputation by my work for the stage, 
that — to the best of my recollection — simply 
never entered my head. I wanted to write plays 
for the joy of the job itself, wholly without any 
ulterior consideration. 

In a letter written when he was eighteen, Long- 
fellow told his father that he most eagerly aspired 



THE POINT OF VIEW 15 

after future eminence in literature; "my whole soul 
burns ardently for it, and every earthly thought 
centers in it." I had no such soaring ambition, and 
none of the proud consciousness of power which 
must have moved Longfellow to this warm expres- 
sion of his youthful hope. What I obeyed was ap- 
parently an inborn impulse, the result of my having 
been taken to the theater not infrequently in my 
childhood, and of having gone there often in my 
boyhood. It was before I was eighteen that I 
made my first attempt, as impossible and as empty 
as a boy's first attempts at play-writing usually are. 
And before I was twenty a bald and hasty adapta- 
tion of a French farce was actually produced by 
real actors in a real theater before a real audience. 
This took place in a Southwestern city, and I did 
not have the excruciating pleasure of being present 
at the ordeal by fire. The piece was given on the 
benefit night of the chief performer; and then it 
sank forever out of sight, raising no ripple on the 
surface of the river of oblivion. 

In the forty years that followed I have written 
other plays, either alone or in collaboration, original 
and not taken from the French. At least half-a- 
dozen of these, some in one act only, and the others 
stretching out to the larger framework of three and 
four acts, have been exposed to the public gaze; 
and two or three of them have been found to pos- 
sess the power of pleasing the assembled playgoers. 
I have never been the happy author of what may be 
termed a "best seller" of the stage, one of these 
triumphant spectacles, displayed for half a thousand 



16 THESE MANY YEARS 

nights on Broadway, with half-a-dozen subsidiary 
companies exploiting it simultaneously from Port- 
land, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, and with foreign 
countries still to be heard from. This prolonged 
pleasure has never been mine; and yet my average 
of success on the stage has not been unsatisfactory. 

What is unsatisfactory that the sum total from 
which this average must be struck is not larger 
than it is, and that I have not oftener presented my- 
self before the footlights, that I have not had plays 
produced season after season, to sink or to swim, 
as the winds of chance might blow. So keen is my 
enjoyment in the inventing, the constructing, and 
in the writing of a play that I can face with tran- 
quillity the deep damnation of its taking off. I 
should not have complained had I had more than 
my fair share of failures, finding full compensation 
in the survivors from the wreck. The craft of play- 
making, with all its arduous secrets, and all its ob- 
scure processes, is to me so fascinating that I can 
sympathize with the remark of a fellow enthusiast 
of a wider experience than mine, to the effect that 
the next best thing to seeing a play of his succeed 
was to see it fail. I suppose that my sympathy 
with this saying evidences in me the survival of the 
gambling instinct, of the eagerness to throw dice 
with fate — for assuredly there is no aleatory ex- 
citement, short of actual warfare, so poignant as 
that inherent in the first performance of a new play 
before a metropolitan audience. 

To write plays, and to keep on writing them, 
and to have them performed, one after another, 



THE POINT OF VIEW 17 

year after year — this was my boyhood ambition; 
and to my constant disappointment this ambition 
has been incompletely gratified. I think I can spy 
out the reasons for this ; the foremost of them is that 
in spite of my love for the dramaturgic art, I never 
abandoned myself to it whole-heartedly — perhaps 
because the vocation was not so clear, the call not 
so loud, as I liked to believe. The drama is a most 
jealous mistress, and I have failed to serve her with 
unwavering fidelity. This is why I have been for 
a score of years or more engaged in expounding by 
word of mouth or on the printed page, the principles 
of the art of play-making rather than in putting 
them into practice for my own account. 

Here is another profession for which I was care- 
fully prepared, this time by my own act, and by 
years of devoted study; and this other profession 
I have been permitted to practise only intermit- 
tently. It would not be easy for me to decide 
which of my two professions, the one abandoned 
almost as soon as I came of age, and the other cher- 
ished unceasingly but never exclusively pursued, 
has had the more obvious influence upon the varied 
events of my life. What it is easy for me to point 
out is that when I was forty I was suddenly and 
most unexpectedly invited to enter a third pro- 
fession — that of teaching — to which I had never 
given a thought, and for which I had made no con- 
scious preparation. 



CHAPTER II 
THE PARENTAGE OF A NEW YORKER 



" /^NE cannot gather some of the best fruits 
i 1 of life without climbing out to the end of 

^^ the slender branches of the Ego," said 
Holmes in one of his essays; and I cite this as an 
excuse for the inevitable prevalence of the perpen- 
dicular pronoun in these rambling reminiscences. I 
am the seventh in descent from James Matthews, 
who came over to Massachusetts between 1630 and 
1636, in which latter year he was living in Charles- 
town. In 1639, or soon thereafter, he removed to 
Yarmouth on Cape Cod, where he was to die in 
January, 1685-6, after having been selectman of 
the town for many years. In 1664 he was represen- 
tative in the colonial legislature. A doubtful tra- 
dition recorded that he was a man of "liberal edu- 
cation"; and this is likely enough, as there were in 
the seventeenth century more college-bred men in 
New England in proportion to the population than 
there ever have been since. 

Altho the proof is inadequate, it seems probable 
also that he was a member of the Glamorganshire 
family of Matthews, which had close relations with 
Bristol, whence so many of the earlier immigrants 
departed to New England. It may be noted that 

18 



PARENTAGE OF A NEW YORKER 19 

the ship in which John Cabot had sailed from that 
port in 1497, on the voyage which resulted in the 
discovery of the mainland, was named either the 
Matthew, after the evangelist, or the Matthews, after 
some local patron — who may have been, so I like 
to fancy, a far distant ancestor of mine. There is 
one piece of evidence which may connect the James 
Matthews who came to New England before 1636 
with an English family of the name. A will is pre- 
served in Gloucester, England, dated 1650, in which 
Margery Matthews of Tewksbury, single woman, 
left forty pounds to her "kinsman, James Matthews, 
now beyond the seas, if he return for it." As James, 
the kinsman of Margery, did not return to claim 
this legacy, it is quite possible that he was the James 
Matthews who died at Yarmouth, thirty odd years 
after the date of this will. 

Wherever the vaguely glimpsed ascendants of 
James Matthews may have dwelt, his descendants 
clung to the sandy soil of Cape Cod for five genera- 
tions. Sometimes they married the daughters of 
their Barnstable County neighbors, and sometimes 
they sought wives as far afield as Boston. On the 
distaff side my father could claim descent from 
William Brewster, the elder who led the Pilgrims on 
the voyage to New England, and also from Thomas 
Prince, twice governor of Plymouth Colony. Two 
other of his ascendants in the female line also de- 
mand mention here; one is Colonel John Gorham, 
who commanded one of the two Plymouth companies 
at the Narragansett fight, in December, 1675, and 
who died of fever while on service in King Philip's 



20 THESE MANY YEARS 

War the year after; and the other is the elder 
Thomas Dexter, the original purchaser of Nahant, 
which he bought for a suit of clothes from an In- 
dian (who was the first person to be hanged in the 
colony). Brewster and Prince, Gorham and Dexter 
— these are good New England names; and it is 
pleasant for me to know that my grandson, if he 
so choose, can easily establish his right of election 
to the Society of the Mayflower Descendants and 
to the Society of Colonial Wars. 

Like the rest of the dwellers on the New England 
coast, the men of the Matthews family were some 
of them farmers, and some of them sailors; and on 
occasion they plowed both the land and the sea. 
There is a family tradition, told to me in my boy- 
hood, that one of our kin, whether by blood or by 
marriage I do not now recall, was in command of a 
wooden paddle-wheel boat in the early days of steam- 
navigation across the Atlantic. The vessel came to 
grief in the ice off the Banks; and the captain, 
standing on the paddle-box with the first officer, 
saw all the passengers and all the crew safely into 
the boats. Then he did his duty and went down 
with his ship. But in the final plunge of the stricken 
vessel, the paddle-box was wrenched free; and by 
clinging to it the captain and his companion were 
saved, to be picked up the next day by the boats 
of a rescuing ship. 



PARENTAGE OF A NEW YORKER 21 



II 

My grandfather, born in 1779 and surviving until 
1857, was named James, as had been his grand- 
father, the grandson of the James Matthews who 
was the first of our family to come to these shores. 
Only once did I see my grandfather, on a solitary 
visit to Cape Cod in my early childhood; and what 
my memory now yields under pressure is only a 
faded portrait of a kindly old man with strong 
features, and a blurred picture of his weather-beaten 
house, wherein the object that most impressed it- 
self was a huge fly-trap, with an ingenious revolving 
device for luring its frequent victims into the fatal 
interior. I remember a long, hot ride along sandy 
roads under sparse pines until we came to a little 
camp-meeting, hidden away in the woods. I can 
recapture also a view of the immense cranberry- 
marshes, stretching out flat on both sides of the 
road; and I have a vision of the vast salt-vats where 
the sea-water was slowly evaporating under the 
midsummer sun. 

From what my father told me at one time or an- 
other, I gather that my grandfather was a fore- 
handed man, "capable" as the New Englander 
terms it, and of a type not uncommon in the little 
towns a century ago — a man who in a larger com- 
munity would have had a fuller incentive to put forth 
all his power. From the fact that he was regularly 
chosen moderator of town -meeting, I judge that he 
had the respect of his fellow townsmen; and from 



22 THESE MANY YEARS 

another fact I infer that he was not always tolerant 
of the weaknesses of his neighbors. He managed 
the town -meetings so firmly and he cut short pro- 
lix discussion so ruthlessly that he was thought by 
some to be a little too arbitrary; and as a result 
the discontented organized secretly, and were able 
to elect another moderator, more likely to be lenient 
to their prolixity. But that summer town-meeting 
lasted three days, and in haying-time, too; so that 
the next year James Matthews became moderator 
again without any opposition. 

One other peculiarity of his I cannot omit, if only 
because of the inverted moral it carries. My grand- 
father had the old Cape Cod habit, perhaps brought 
home from his seafaring days, of indulging every 
evening in a goblet of Medford rum, properly diluted 
with water; and it was the cherished right of his 
three sons, when they were in their teens, to claim 
each in his turn the solitary lump of sugar that was 
left at the bottom of the glass. At the risk of sadly 
disappointing the natural expectation of any tee- 
totallers who may chance to read these records, I 
am bound to state that this early taste of liquor 
at a most susceptible age did not later lead any 
one of his sons to delight in strong drink. I can 
testify that my father, at least, was one of the most 
abstemious men I have ever known; and even in 
his old age, when he was ordered to take stimu- 
lants, his doses were infrequent and almost infini- 
tesimal. 



PARENTAGE OF A NEW YORKER 23 



III 

In Yarmouth in 1814 my father, Edward Mat- 
thews, was born; and he was the first of our stock 
to abandon Cape Cod. He did a man's work on 
his father's farm long before he was sixteen; long 
before he was twenty he moved to Boston in search 
of a larger field for his untiring energy. A few years 
later he went West; and he used to tell me that he 
supposed he was one of the first white men to go 
under the Falls of St. Anthony. At St. Louis and 
New Orleans, up and down the Mississippi, and 
along its chief tributaries, he pushed his fortune, 
shrewdly foreseeing the movement of prices. He 
was an operator in cotton, in breadstuff s, and in 
provisions, never hesitating to extend his purchases 
beyond the daring of his rivals, but never "specu- 
lating," as he always insisted to me. That is to 
say, he was never tempted into that taking of 
chances which is purely gambling, ready as he 
always was to run any risk, when his imaginative 
insight into world-politics and into trade-conditions 
revealed to him that the hour had come when cour- 
age would reap its full reward. 

More often than not his vision was sound, but it 
was not infallible; and while he generally made 
money, now and again he lost. Altho he liked to 
have ample means to spend on his family and on 
others, he did not greatly care for money itself, 
his real pleasure arising rather from the making of 
it, from beholding the tangible result of his bold 



24 THESE MANY YEARS 

enterprise. He was a true descendant of the mer- 
chant adventurers of Tudor England; and there was 
an Elizabethan spaciousness in his outlook upon 
opportunity. The son of one of his earliest friends 
declared that his grandiose audacity in his gigantic 
operations made him appear "a kind of a hero of 
commerce, especially when one remembers the time 
when these were made — before any large fortunes 
had been accumulated, before Wall Street was, 
before inflation had popularized speculation." 

When he sat to Bonnat in Paris a few years be- 
fore his death, in 1887, he was weakened by pa- 
tiently endured pain; and perhaps for this reason 
the portrait has a spiritual quality not common in 
the paintings of this artist. None the less has it all 
his customary vigor and directness. While at work 
upon it, Bonnat remarked to my sister that her 
father had striking and significant features, so that 
he was eminently paintable: "In fact, he has a head 
like those that Titian used to paint." The most 
obvious explanation of this shrewd saying may be 
found in the fact that Titian was wont to portray 
the patricians of Venice, a city whose merchants 
were princes, and whose princes were merchants. 
Never at any time could my father be mistaken for 
other than an American, yet he conformed to the 
type of merchant endowed with a far-reaching 
imagination as this existed in Italy. 

On Cape Cod at the end of the second decade of 
the nineteenth century, even the most ambitious of 
boys had scant schooling; and my father could 
profit only by a few short winter terms. It was 



PARENTAGE OF A NEW YORKER 25 

always a wonder to me how he had acquired his 
knowledge of books. Pope and Byron were early 
favorites, from whom he used to quote occasionally. 
Of the later writers, he was attracted to Thackeray 
and to Taine. He had an instinctive liking for the 
best, and an almost intuitive power for its percep- 
tion — accompanied naturally enough by a keen 
dislike for the second-rate. It was rather by travel 
than by reading that he cultivated his taste for 
beauty; and he came in time to have a singular 
delicacy of appreciation in judging enamels and 
laces and paintings. He was, in short, one of those 
very unusual men whose natural gifts are so gener- 
ous that they can attain to culture without the 
customary foundation of a liberal education. 

Probably because he did not resolutely set him- 
self to the task he never acquired any foreign lan- 
guage, not even French; yet he had an unusual 
ability to make himself understood in whatever 
country he might chance to be. Indeed, he used 
to say that he had travelled very comfortably all 
over Europe, or at least in France and Italy and 
Germany, with the aid of the single word "Com- 
bien?" — an apt illustration of the truth of the 
American saying that "money talks." 

But my father understood the universal language 
of art; and he was in advance of his time in his 
enjoyment of Japanese bronzes, for example, and of 
the exquisite work of the contemporary French 
goldsmiths who had resuscitated and rivalled the 
craftsmanship of Benvenuto Cellini. He had an 
almost feminine delicacy of taste, and he had it in 



26 THESE MANY YEARS 

a degree rarely achieved by any woman, since it is 
noteworthy that altho men are far less likely to be 
dowered with this gift than women, when they do 
possess it they have it more abundantly and more 
certainly. In Italy in 1867 my father was keenly 
interested in Castellani's reproduction of Etruscan 
ornaments; and it was to him that the artist-anti- 
quary once made the suggestive remark that he had 
in his shops not a few workmen who could improve 
on the handicraft of Cellini, altho not one of them 
could be counted on to make an original design of 
any vital value. Into his purchases of these ob- 
jects of art and also of paintings, my father carried 
all the sagacity which had characterized his money- 
making. When he finally lost his fortune, after the 
panic of 1873, he had to dispose of most of the 
treasures collected during the preceding decade; 
and he found some slight consolation for this part- 
ing from things he had lovingly gathered in the 
fact that he was able to sell them for more than they 
had cost him. 

When the Civil War broke out my father was too 
broken in health to volunteer, and he had to content 
himself with sending a substitute. As a New 
Englander who had lived long in New Orleans, he 
had no illusions as to the early end of the struggle. 
He knew the temper of the North and of the South; 
and he foresaw that the strife would be long- 
protracted. Therefore he began at once to buy 
cotton, and he persevered in this enterprise all thru 
the four years of incessant fighting. With the aid 
of an unnaturalized British subject whom he sup- 



PARENTAGE OF A NEW YORKER 27 

plied with funds, and who kept for the most part 
within the steadily shrinking Confederate lines, he 
managed to get out many thousand bales that might 
otherwise have been destroyed. His earliest pur- 
chases cost him only seven or eight cents a pound; 
and his latest sales realized nearly two dollars a 
pound. His judgment as to the exact moment 
when it was wise to withdraw from an operation 
was not always as sound as his instinct as to the 
minute when this operation should begin; but in 
the Civil War he perceived when the end was at hand; 
and he withdrew from the cotton market long be- 
fore it broke. 

One incident of this series of operations in cotton 
during the war deserves to be dwelt on, as illustra- 
tive of the disfavor with which the Union cause 
was regarded in England, and more particularly in 
Liverpool, which had been hard hit by the interrup- 
tion of trade relations. When the Trent affair 
occurred, my father had more than one cargo of 
cotton on the Atlantic on its way to the Lancashire 
spinners who were eagerly awaiting it; and in the 
uncertainty as to the outcome of the strained rela- 
tions between Great Britain and the United States, 
he thought it wise to take the first steamer to Eng- 
land, that he might defend his property in person. 
He spent several lonely and wearisome weeks of 
waiting at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, a port 
then apparently populated solely by Southern 
sympathizers. As a result of this intensity of feel- 
ing my father was cut in the street by men who 
had sat at his table in New Orleans only a few years 



28 THESE MANY YEARS 

before. And on more than one occasion certain of 
these men went into the coffee-room of the Adelphi 
while my father was taking a solitary meal, and, 
dividing into two groups, they sat themselves down 
at tables right and left of him, so that they might 
loudly talk across, violently expressing their dislike 
for all Yankees. 

My father had early become a firm believer in 
the future of New York. He had moved here be- 
fore the war, and had bought a house. Before the 
effects of the inflation which resulted from the 
superabundant issue of the greenbacks needed to 
carry on the gigantic struggle had manifested them- 
selves by a rise in prices, he began to invest the 
profits of his cotton operations in real estate in the 
immediate vicinity of the Stock Exchange. He 
altered a host of old houses into commodious 
offices to shelter the feverish speculators of the Gold 
Room, and of the later petroleum boom. The 
Empire Building, at the corner of Broadway and 
Rector Street, was the first office edifice to be 
equipped with an elevator. He was as far-sighted 
and as courageous in his real-estate purchases in 
New York as he had been in his earlier operations 
in other parts of the country. In 1873 his rent- 
roll was more than half a million dollars. Unfor- 
tunately he had made the error of heavily mort- 
gaging these profitable properties, which were rising 
in value year by year, in order to obtain control of 
an uncompleted railroad in North Carolina. And 
it was not long after the panic that he found him- 
self forced to part with all his deeply encumbered 



PARENTAGE OF A NEW YORKER 29 

real estate in the vain hope of saving his prepon- 
derant interest in an unprofitable road. 



IV 

It was while he was residing in the South that my 
father met my mother, Virginia Brander, the second 
daughter of James S. Brander. This maternal 
grandfather of mine had been born in 1792 near 
Elgin, in the northwestern part of Scotland; and he 
arrived in the United States at the end of the first 
decade of the last century. Altho, like my father 
in New England, my grandfather could have had 
in Scotland little opportunity for schooling, he had, 
like my father again, the sturdy resolution and the 
unflagging energy by which the Scots and the New 
Englanders of a century ago were nerved to over- 
come the disadvantages of an unduly shortened 
education. When I knew him in the later years 
of his life, he was a man of combined dignity and 
charm, kindly and shrewd, holding his own easily 
in any society in which he might be placed. In 
different towns of the United States, at first in Peters- 
burg, then in New York, and later in New Orleans, 
he had early proved that he had a full share of the 
business acumen characteristic of the hardy Scots 
who came to this country to push their fortunes. 
He revealed also his possession of the solidity of 
character which wins the respect even of rivals in 
trade, and which is ever more important than the 
faculty of making money. 

He was the owner of the earliest line of packets 



30 THESE MANY YEARS 

to sail for Europe from any of our ports south of 
Mason and Dixon's line. His mercantile activity 
stretched from the War of 1812 to the Civil War, 
just before the outbreak of which he retired from 
business with what was then considered a com- 
fortable fortune. I have reason to believe that I 
was his favorite grandchild; and when I was only 
a little boy, scarcely out of the nursery, he called 
after me a ship he was having built. He even 
ordered that the gilded figurehead of this vessel 
should be carved in my effigy. As I never saw the 
Young Brander I cannot testify to the accuracy of 
the resplendent image. Nor do I know into whose 
hands the ship passed after my grandfather parted 
with it; but I believe that its career was untimely 
cut off, and that it was one of the ships captured 
and sunk by the Alabama during her bloodless 
cruises. 

It was while he was living in Petersburg that 
my grandfather married my grandmother, Harriet 
McGraw of Chesterfield County, Virginia. There 
were three sons of this marriage and two daughters, 
my mother being the youngest of the five children. 
Like many another Scot who had become an Ameri- 
can by choice, my grandfather was loyal both to his 
native land and to his adopted country; and as a 
testimony of this double devotion he bestowed the 
name of "Caledonia" upon his elder daughter, 
and he was about to inflict that of "Columbia" 
upon the younger, when he relented in favor of 
"Virginia" — a recognition of States' rights for 
which my mother was ever after profoundly grateful. 



PARENTAGE OF A NEW YORKER 31 

In the privacy of the domestic circle the harsh 
and forbidding name of the elder sister was speedily 
softened, and I recall her as "Aunt Doney." She 
married an Englishman, and when as a bride she 
entered the home of her husband's parents near 
Liverpool, his aged nurse, who had hidden behind 
the door to see what manner of woman this Ameri- 
can might be whom the son of the house had taken 
to wife, broke out with the astonished cry: "Why, 
she's white!" To this day it is impossible even to 
guess what color the old servant expected an Ameri- 
can bride to be, whether red or black. My aunt's 
marriage, it may be noted, had taken place in the 
years between 1840 and 1850, and therefore after 
the publication of the earliest 'Leatherstocking 
Tales,' and before the publication of 'Uncle Tom's 
Cabin.' 

With a canny Scot's high regard for education, 
my grandfather saw to it that his daughters should 
have the advantages denied to him. My mother 
had been born in 1827, and her sister was only a 
year older. By good fortune they were early sent 
to Miss McClenahan's school in New York. We 
are carelessly inclined to believe that our educa- 
tional practices are far more advanced now in the 
first quarter of the twentieth century than they 
could have been in the second quarter of the nine- 
teenth century, and I confess that it is improbable 
that there were in the United States in 1840 many 
schools for girls so admirably conducted as that to 
which my mother and my aunt owed their unusual 
training. Miss McClenahan's methods may have 



32 THESE MANY YEARS 

been old-fashioned if judged by up-to-date stand- 
ards; but she did somehow manage to train the 
girls committed to her charge, and to train them 
with conscientious thoroness. 

As a result of this schooling, I recall my mother 
as the best-educated woman I have ever known. 
She knew what she knew with absolute certainty; 
and she was modestly aware of the boundaries of 
her knowledge. Her memory was marvellously 
comprehensive and accurate; apparently she never 
forgot anything that was worth remembering. And 
her education had not stopped with the end of her 
school-days, when she was only sixteen. Her am- 
bition had been widely awakened, and she was in- 
cessant in improving herself almost as long as she 
lived, taking an unflagging interest in the progress 
of the world, even when she had long passed three- 
score years and ten. 

At Miss McClenahan's school my mother was not 
only solidly grounded in the essentials of education, 
she had also an ample opportunity to acquire the 
accomplishments, music and foreign languages — 
the accomplishments which are only too often ac- 
cepted as feminine substitutes for the essentials. 
Her French was fluent and accurate; and her Italian 
teacher was that Lorenzo da Ponte who had in his 
youth supplied the libretto for Mozart's 'Don Gio- 
vanni.' In history, and also I think in English, the 
chief instructor for the older girls was John Bigelow; 
and my mother used to tell us how handsome he 
was as a young man, and how distinguished his 
manner — and also how the schoolgirls all admired 



PARENTAGE OF A NEW YORKER 33 

him, and how some of them sighed for him in se- 
cret. 

I do not wish to suggest that my mother was a 
woman of unusual intellectual power. She was 
quick-witted and clear-minded, a good talker and 
an excellent listener. She was not in the least aus- 
tere in her outlook on life, and on occasion, in the 
privacy of the family circle, she could be a most amus- 
ing mimic. She was the ultimate embodiment of 
feminine refinement and of womanly delicacy, and 
in consequence of this she was a little too shrink- 
ing, or perhaps it would be juster to say, a little too 
lacking in any forthputting energy, ever to seize a 
commanding position in society. Altho she was 
hospitable, she never took the first step toward new 
friendships, and she was disinclined ever to pay a 
first call. A most gracious and winning hostess in 
her own home, she had, whenever she went without 
its walls, what may fairly be termed a grand man- 
ner, native to her and not tainted by any trace of 
affectation. Indeed, affectation or pretense of any 
kind was wholly foreign to her nature. Her por- 
trait was painted by Cabanel when she was already 
elderly, but as is the custom of Parisian artists, 
he translated her into French, and presented her 
as a somewhat sophisticated countrywoman of his 
own. This is why I much prefer a simpler and 
earlier portrait in my possession, due to the brush 
of Buchanan Read (to whose pen we owe ' Sheridan's 
Ride ') — a portrait which bestows on her the slop- 
ing shoulders fashionable in the fifties, but which 
also captures not a little of her gracious dignity. 



34 THESE MANY YEARS 



We none of us order our lives to best advantage, 
and as we look back at our careers we cannot but 
blush at the blunders we have committed. Yet as 
I turn my gaze to the past, and as I bring before my 
eyes again the figures most familiar to me in my 
childhood, it seems to me that in one respect at 
least I made no mistake. I did not err in what is 
perhaps the most momentous act of life, the most 
far-reaching in its inevitable and inexorable conse- 
quences — in the choice of my parents and of my 
grandparents. However much I may be dissatis- 
fied with myself, with them at least I am com- 
pletely contented. 



CHAPTER III 
EARLY SCHOOL-DAYS 



A YEAR or two earlier than 1850 my father, 
in the course of his operations up and down 
the Mississippi, found himself in New Or- 
leans, and there made the acquaintance of my 
mother, my grandfather Brander having recently 
removed from New York. For two or three years 
my father courted my mother, in New Orleans in 
the winter, and in the summer at the White Sulphur 
Springs. They were married in the early spring of 
1851, and for their wedding trip they went on their 
first voyage to Europe. In the fall they took a house 
in New Orleans, and there I was born on the 21st 
of February, 1852. I was christened James Brander, 
after my mother's father — James being also the 
name of my father's father. As it happened I was 
always called Brander in the family and never 
James; and thus it was that when I became a man 
of letters and felt the need of a trademark to war- 
rant my literary wares, I dropped out of my signa- 
ture the James which had come to me from both 
my grandfathers. 

Of my infancy in New Orleans I can recapture 
only a blurred impression of a single walk along a 
broad street; I was holding tight to my grand- 

35 



36 THESE MANY YEARS 

father's hand, and we passed in front of a vacant 
lot shut in by a board fence, decorated with most 
terrifying pictures — identifiable now as probably 
the posters of some sensational melodrama of the 
day. Of our brief semiannual visits to Chicago, 
where we paused every spring on our way North, 
and every fall on our return to the South, I can recall 
only the clear memory of sidewalks on two different 
levels, so that we were frequently forced to go up 
or to go down half-a-dozen steps, more or less of a 
feat for my infant legs; and I know now that this 
must have been in the year when Chicago was 
bravely and boldly raising itself above the muddy 
shore of the lake. And of the Mississippi steam- 
boats that took us up and down the river from a 
point opposite Chicago, I find I can evoke no vision 
at all, altho my mother told me more than once 
that on one trip a fellow-passenger, a lady with 
obstreperous children of her own, was so impressed 
by my exemplary behavior that she stopped me to 
ask what made me such a good boy — to which I 
promptly made answer that it was because when I 
was naughty "my mother spanked me with her 
slipper and my nursey with her india-rubber shoe." 
This explanation, so my mother commented as she 
told the tale, might be a statement of the exact 
fact, but it was false in as far as it might suggest 
that these dire punishments were frequently in- 
flicted. 

We used to pass thru Chicago on our way from 
New York to New Orleans, and from New Orleans 
to New York, because there was in the early fifties 



EARLY SCHOOL-DAYS 37 

no satisfactory railroad connection thru the Southern 
States. The condition of travelling had been even 
more inconvenient when my mother was a girl at 
school in New York, for then the most comfortable 
route was to take a Hudson River steamboat up 
to Albany, where they transferred to one of the 
commodious passenger-packets on the Erie Canal, 
which conveyed them in course of time to Buffalo, 
where they got on board a lake-steamer bound to 
Chicago, whence a stage-coach carried them to the 
nearest town on the Mississippi, to catch the first 
steamboat stopping there on its long trip down to 
New Orleans. 

We did not always go so far down the river as 
New Orleans, for we spent one winter at St. Louis. 
Here again I can call back only a single picture, 
which informs me now that it must have imprinted 
itself on my infant retina during the first year of 
the siege of Sebastopol, since what I see in the glass 
of memory is a gas-lit room wherein a negro boy 
enters bearing the evening paper, which my mother 
takes up at once, only to sigh over "the sufferings 
of the poor fellows in the trenches." 

II 

We did not always go South, for in 1857 we 
went abroad for a European visit, which lasted more 
than a year. In those remote days the southern 
countries of Europe were scarcely better provided 
with railroads than the southern part of the United 
States; and the posting system still survived. So 



38 THESE MANY YEARS 

my father bought a comfortable travelling-carriage 
in Paris, in which we were to journey as far south 
as Naples. This carriage had a rumble behind, for 
the courier and for my nurse, the worthy English- 
woman who had corrected me with her india-rubber 
shoe, and who was always in a state of exasperated 
hostility toward her Italian travelling-companion, 
the highly efficient courier. Fitted to the top of 
the carriage were three large shallow boxes, which 
contained our outfits, and which were unstrapped 
and taken to our rooms when we stopped for the 
night. 

I believe that we went by rail to Basle, taking 
the carriage with us; and that once in Switzerland 
we had to depend for conveyance on our own ve- 
hicle, the successive post-houses, a few miles apart, 
supplying us regularly with four horses, ridden by 
two postilions. Thus it was that my father and 
my mother first saw Switzerland, and in a far more 
satisfactory fashion than is possible to-day, when 
the railroads rush us to our destination by the 
shortest line, whirling us over valleys and whisking 
us thru mountains. Our carriage wound up and 
down the lovely valleys at a leisurely gait, no more 
rapid in the descent than in the ascent, since our 
speed in going down was checked not only by the 
brake, but also by wooden shoes slipped under the 
rear wheels. 

I regret to have to confess that our zigzag wander- 
ing thru the length and the breadth of Switzerland 
in the summer of 1857 did not photograph itself 
on my memory; and that the only negative I can 



EARLY SCHOOL-DAYS 39 

now develop is the landscape after we had come down 
into Italy on the way to Milan. This is a landscape 
with figures, the flat plain, stretching away indefi- 
nitely, the straight road lined on both sides with tall, 
thin, Lombardy poplars, the carriage rolling smoothly 
behind the four horses, the rising and falling backs 
of the two gaily caparisoned postilions — and a 
small boy of five kneeling on the front seat, facing 
forward, and now and again calling out, "Avanti, 
postiglione ! " — not that he was in any hurry, but 
rather for the childish pleasure of giving orders in a 
foreign tongue. 

By a linguistic misunderstanding related to me in 
after years I can fix the fact that we stayed a night 
in Ferrara. When our belongings had been borne 
up to our apartment, the head-waiter appeared to 
take orders for our dinner. My mother asked him 
if it would not be possible for us to have partridges. 
Owing either to some slip in her use of the tongue 
she had learned from Da Ponte, or to the barrier 
interposed by the harsh local dialect, this simple 
question failed to be correctly understood. At 
least, this is what my mother could not but infer 
when the head-waiter smiled complacently and drew 
himself up and answered: "No, Signora; by the 
grace of God I was born in Ferrara!" And my 
mother was never able to guess how her inquiry 
had been transmogrified into a question to which 
this was a proper answer. 

From Ferrara we journeyed in time to Florence; 
and there my father ordered from Fedi, the sculptor, 
whose 'Rape of Polyxena' had just been placed in 



40 THESE MANY YEARS 

the Loggia dei Lanzi, a statue of me — or at least, 
a statue of a boy of my years, riding on a dolphin, 
and possessing a head for which I posed, and which 
reveals the young Arion as having his hair artfully 
arranged with a central roll, then known as a 
"roach." 

We went on to Rome, and while we were there my 
father and mother were presented to the Pope, 
Pius IX; and they took me with them. All that I 
can now recall of this visit to the Vatican is our 
walking down what seemed to me then a very long 
gallery, at the far end of which there stood a mo- 
tionless figure in white — a figure which my mother, 
even then a little short-sighted, took at first for a 
statue, but which we soon recognized as that of 
the sovereign pontiff himself. The Pope was very 
gracious to the little Protestant boy of five who 
had come from across the Atlantic, and who looked 
up at him with wonder; and he said that I was 
very young to have travelled so far. Then he be- 
stowed his blessing upon all three of us; and our 
audience was over. 

On a later visit to Rome I was told about the 
characteristically clever formula which Pius IX had 
invented to make conversation with the many 
strangers from all parts of the world whom he per- 
mitted to be presented to him. When he found 
the person with whom he was talking a little at a 
loss for a topic, he used to ask if his visitor had 
been long in Rome. If the answer was, "A few 
weeks only," the Pope returned: "Then I suppose 
you have seen nearly everything." If he were told 



EARLY SCHOOL-DAYS 41 

that the stranger had spent a winter in the Holy 
City, he rejoined: "Then I suppose you are begin- 
ning to find your way around?" And if the visitor 
explained that he had been in Rome often before, 
or that he had spent a year or more there, the Pope 
would smile understandingly and respond: "Then 
I suppose you have already discovered that nobody 
can ever know Rome !" 

In the earlier months of 1858 there were many 
American families in Rome, some of them old ac- 
quaintances of my parents; and I recall that I was 
taken with them once when they went to pay a 
visit to Governor and Mrs. Hamilton Fish. Under 
the eyes of our elders I had a shy conversation with 
two of the sons of Mr. Fish, Hamilton and Stuy- 
vesant, only a little older than I, not then fore- 
seeing that we three would next meet as room- 
mates in the same boarding-school, and that the 
younger of them would be my classmate in Columbia 
College, and the elder my classmate in the law 
school. 

There were so many visitors to Rome that winter 
that there was difficulty in securing post-horses 
when the gay season ceased suddenly at the begin- 
ning of Lent. My father arranged with Governor 
Fish, who was also going down to Naples, that the 
respective departures of the two families should be 
so timed that their carriage would go on in ad- 
vance of ours, and thus their horses after an inter- 
val of rest would be available for our carriage. 
Our delayed departure had one advantage — that 
we were able to linger late enough on the evening 



42 THESE MANY YEARS 

of Shrove Tuesday to let us see the traditional illu- 
mination of tapers, moccoletti, all along the Cor so; 
but it had the disadvantage that we had to journey 
thru the darkness. Night-travel in the Roman ter- 
ritory was then believed to be unhealthy because 
of the malaria. And in the Neapolitan territory 
even day -travel was none too safe, because of brig- 
andage. My father had to forego the trip to 
Psestum, in consequence of the warnings he re- 
ceived in regard to the insecurity of the roads and 
the danger of being held for ransom — a danger 
which he might have risked for himself but to 
which he was naturally unwilling to expose his 
young wife. 

Ill 

We returned to the United States for the next 
winter, which we spent at the New York Hotel on 
the corner of Broadway and Waverly Place, then 
perhaps the hotel where the pleasantest people 
were likely to be found; especially was it a gather- 
ing-place for Southerners. I think it likely that 
my father was attracted to it because his old friend, 
Isaac Sherman, was then staying there; and I re- 
call Mr. Sherman's daughter, a pretty girl with her 
long hair hanging down in pigtails — a daughter 
now long resident in England, but still remembered 
in New York as the giver of the widely discussed 
Bradley-Martin ball. I can replevin from out of 
the past only two things associated with that win- 
ter — the vision of the comet, to be seen night after 



EARLY SCHOOL-DAYS 43 

night, and peered at by me always from the same 
window of the long corridor thru which I was being 
led away to bed; and second the lively picture of 
Broadway after an unusually heavy snow-storm, 
when it was thronged with sleighs of all sorts and 
sizes, dominated by the huge open omnibuses on 
runners drawn by four horses and made comforta- 
ble by many buffalo-robes and by abundant straw 
thick about the feet of the passengers. 

The New York Hotel was then kept by a Mr. 
Cranston (who afterward bought Cozzen's hotel on 
the Hudson, a little below West Point, and changed 
its name to his own). While we were residing in 
his hotel that winter of 1858-9, he was the victim 
of a murderous assault from the effects of which he 
did not recover for months. A man had brought his 
family to the hotel; and the landlord found out that 
one of the children was down with some contagious 
disease. To protect the other guests of his house, 
Cranston compelled the removal of this sick child 
to the hospital. I am under the impression that 
this removal may have taken place while the sick 
child's father was absent; but at any rate it so 
enraged him that he came into the dining-room of 
the hotel, where the landlord was sitting at dinner, 
and lifting up the champagne bottle which stood 
in a bucket of ice beside the chair, he smashed it 
over Cranston's head. 

In the quarter of a century since my father had 
escaped from Cape Cod he had never settled him- 
self for long in any one place, roving from North 
to South, and from East to West as he heard the 



44 THESE MANY YEARS 

summons of opportunity. My mother had been 
born in Petersburg, and she had gone with her 
father when he removed from Virginia to New York, 
and from New York to New Orleans; but she felt 
herself most at home in New York, where she had 
spent part of her girlhood, and where she had been 
at school. When she had first seen New York it 
was still a sprawling little town, cluttering only the 
toe of Manhattan Island; for a year or two my 
grandfather had resided on the Battery, then a 
center of fashion; and one summer the family went 
out of town to Niblo's Garden — which was on 
the corner of Broadway and Prince Street, and 
which was later to become the site of a long-famous 
theater. Since my mother's childhood the city had 
been steadily spreading upward and outward; and 
it was more than a mile to the north of Niblo's 
Garden that my father found a house to his taste, 
a house built by an architect for his own occupancy. 
My father had decided to settle down permanently 
in New York, and to make it the home of his family. 
So it was that after infant wanderings in the South 
and in the Middle West and in Europe, I became a 
New Yorker when I was seven years old. 

The house which my father purchased in 1859 
to present to my mother was a spacious and com- 
modious dwelling on the east side of Fifth Avenue 
between Seventeenth and Eighteenth Streets, in 
what was then the most attractive part of that most 
famous of residence thorofares, a part now wholly 
unattractive, alas ! shorn of its splendors and aban- 
doned to huge sweat-shops, whose outlandish work- 



EARLY SCHOOL-DAYS 45 

ers take their nooning on its impassable sidewalks. 
When we moved into 101 Fifth Avenue there was 
not a shop of any kind anywhere up and down the 
length of the stately street. So hostile was the 
sentiment of the dwellers on the avenue toward 
the invasion of trade that it must have taken des- 
perate courage for the first shopkeeper to intrude 
into the consecrated region, and all the more ex- 
traordinary is it therefore, that the breach should 
have been made by a member of a calling so timor- 
ous that it is traditionally credited with only the 
ninth part of a soul. Yet less than half-a-dozen 
years after we had settled down in our new home 
George Arnold rimed a wail of lament that the 
avenue was 

falling from grace 
at a terrible pace. 
I hear, when I promenade there, 
Strange voices of grief in the air; 
And I fancy I see, 
The sad sisters three, 
With their black trailing dresses 
And dishevelled tresses 
Go, solemn and slow, 
To and fro, 
In their woe, 
Sighing, ^ 
And crying, 
Eheu ! Eheu ! Eheu ! 
There's a tailor in Fifth Avenue ! 

The name of this first daring invader is now lost 
in the dark abyss of Time; but another half-a-dozen 
years later, when I was a sophomore at Columbia 



46 THESE MANY YEARS 

College, there burgeoned forth on the corner below 
us a gilded sign boldly proclaiming the opening of 
a shop by "G. D. Happy, Tailor" — an offensive 
proclamation which evoked from my classmate, 
Stuyvesant Fish, the remark that if this tailor met 
with failure, he would not be so G — d — happy. 

IV 

Even in 1860, when we took possession of our new 
home, the residences on Fifth Avenue had pushed 
themselves only so far up-town as the crest of Murray 
Hill; and the mile or more that stretched up to the 
still incomplete Central Park was but sparsely built 
on. Union Square and Madison Square (which had 
only recently become celebrated as the abode of 
Miss Flora McFlimsey) were all girt about by brown- 
stone, high-stoop residences of an unimaginative 
monotony; there was also a corresponding settle- 
ment of the older New York families as far east as 
Stuyvesant Square. On the north side of Union 
Square was the spacious residence of Mrs. Parish 
(soon to serve as the first house of the Union League 
Club); and there I was taken to gaze wonderingly 
at the very elaborate model, ten or fifteen feet long, 
of a plan for Central Park, which Mrs. Parish had 
submitted and which had been rejected in favor of 
that prepared by Frederick Law Olms tead. 

As I try to sort out the disappointing packages in 
the lucky bag of reminiscences accumulated by the 
not very observant small boy of eight that I was in 
those far-off years, I discover that the white-marble 



EARLY SCHOOL-DAYS 47 

Fifth Avenue Hotel had just been opened, and that 
it was considered to be truly worthy of the Empire 
City, more especially since it was equipped with a 
passenger-elevator that rose with slow and solemn 
dignity, on a solid iron shaft thrust up out of a deep 
hole in the ground. And I believe that my mother 
once told me that I had seen Abraham Lincoln 
drive past the New York Hotel on his flying visit 
to the city to deliver the address at Cooper Union 
which made possible his renomination for the presi- 
dency. I know that my father voted for Bell and 
Everett; and I think I can recall his doubts about 
Lincoln as an uncouth and untried backwoodsman, 
wholly unfitted to be President at that climax of 
political tension. 

What I do remember distinctly was my being 
allowed to sit up far beyond my usual hour to see 
the torchlight procession of Lincoln's supporters, 
the glittering parade of the "wide-awakes," as they 
were called. And with equal distinctness I remem- 
ber that a few weeks later — altho it may have 
been a few weeks earlier — I was permitted to be- 
hold a second nocturnal spectacle, the parade of 
the about-to-be-abolished Volunteer Fire Depart- 
ment, which took place in honor of the Prince of 
Wales. My childish fancy was greatly taken by a 
huge stuffed tiger which adorned the top of "Big 
Six"; and I know now that the man who was then 
foreman of "Big Six" was William M. Tweed, 
afterward to win a world-wide infamy as the chief 
of the Tammany ring which robbed the city of 
many millions. 



48 THESE MANY YEARS 

I had attended the class for little boys at a girl's 
school kept by two friends of my mother's, the 
Misses Sedgwick; and in the fall of 1860 I was sent 
for the first time to a boy's school. This was kept 
by Mr. George C. Anthon, a nephew of Professor 
Charles Anthon of Columbia College; it was distant 
only a single block from our house, being held in a 
dwelling (still standing as I pass these pages in 
1917) on the southeast corner of Broadway and 
Eighteenth Street. It was a block below the Goelet 
house, with its high iron railing, thru which Henry 
James used to peer a few years earlier when he was 
a small boy, and which even then sheltered the 
Peacock and the Cow that Sidney Rosenfeld was to 
celebrate in lively rimes just before this last vestige 
of rusticity disappeared to give place to a business 
building. Mr. Anthon's school had for me the 
further advantage of being exactly opposite the 
best toy -store in New York, a dark but most allur- 
ing repository of varied joys kept by a Frenchman 
named Phillipoteaux. 

Perhaps because I was an only son of indulgent 
parents I was unduly self-assertive and opinionated, 
not to say forthputting. Those were the days of 
the Heenan and Sayers prize-fight; and most Ameri- 
cans loyally believed that the Benecia Boy had been 
cheated out of his well-won victory by the bad 
faith of the British onlookers, who saw the battle 
going a'gainst their favorite. I do not record it as 
a testimony to my popularity, for perhaps that is 
just what it is not; but it is a fact nevertheless that 
I soon received from my schoolmates the nickname 



EARLY SCHOOL-DAYS 49 

of the Benecia Boy, probably not so much from any 
approved prowess as from my willingness to enter 
on a quarrel. It seems to me now, more than half 
a century later, as I look back over my more mature 
years, that I am a mild-mannered man, not given 
to brawling; and therefore I am a little at a loss 
to account for my juvenile efflorescence of pugnacity. 
Of very trifling value are my other reminiscences 
of the two years I spent at Mr. Anthon's school. 
My admiration was excited by the surprising skill 
of one of the teachers who had carved a block of 
chalk into a miniature model of the staring white 
Fifth Avenue Hotel. My palate was gratified by 
the six-inch lengths of ripe sugar-cane, from which 
I was privileged to suck the juice — this gratifica- 
tion of my palate taking place at the house of my 
schoolfellow Bradish Johnson, whose father owned 
a sugar-plantation in Louisiana. And my regret 
was aroused by the conflagration of the Crystal 
Palace, which I had been permitted to visit, and 
which had stood in what is now Bryant Park, be- 
hind the Public Library that has replaced the Reser- 
voir. 



What I recall with a keener pleasure is the fact 
that I was now allowed to enter the enchanted realm 
of the theater — enchanting to me even before I 
had come under its spell, for when we were in Lon- 
don in 1858 my parents had gone to see Mr. and 
Mrs. Charles Kean in their sumptuous revival of 



50 THESE MANY YEARS 

the 'Tempest' at the Princess's Theater; and as I 
was then only six years old there had been no 
thought of taking me. But when my mother the 
next morning told me all about the wonders of the 
spectacle she had seen, I was greatly aggrieved that 
I had not been permitted to behold all these glories 
for myself. It must have been before I was eight 
that I was taken to Laura Keene's to see my first 
play with my own eyes; it was Boucicault's drama- 
tization of the ' Heart of Midlothian/ which he 
called * Jeanie Deans,' after the heroine impersonated 
by his wife; and to this day I can re visualize one 
sensational moment, when the huge doors of the 
Tolbooth were at last broken in by the howling 
mob which had stormed the prison and which 
swarmed all over the stage. It must have been 
before I was ten that I was taken to Niblo's Garden 
to see Edwin Forrest in 'Macbeth'; and as this was 
also a play of Scottish life and character, I infer 
that I owed both of these early joys to my mother's 
father. It was probably between these two North- 
British plays that I witnessed a performance better 
suited to my tender years — that of the Ravels, 
those ingenious and accomplished pantomimists, 
whose art I was then unable to appreciate, but whose 
adroitness I could marvel at, especially when they 
cut up a live man only to put the pieces together 
again so that he could walk off in possession of all 
his members. And it must have been before J. W. 
Wallack built his theater at the northeast corner of 
Broadway and 13th Street that I was allowed to 
go to Grizzly Adams's Bear Show, in a tent on 



EARLY SCHOOL-DAYS 51 

the lot where the new playhouse was soon to be 
erected. 

There were other and more thrilling spectacles 
out in the open streets of the city when the war 
began with the shot on Fort Sumter: 

"Rata-tat-tat ! 
Those were the sounds of that battle summer, 
Till the earth seemed a parchment round and flat, 
And every footfall the tap of a drummer." 

In the summer of 1860 we had spent a few weeks 
at Cozzen's Hotel just below West Point, and there 
I had stared up at the tall bulk of General Scott, 
and had watched with wonder the swift evolutions 
of Ellsworth's little company of Zouaves which had 
camped in the grounds of the hotel. But now in 
New York what I saw was not the parade drill of a 
single crack company, but regiment after regiment 
tramping day after day down the Avenue on their 
way to the front. They came from the north by 
the Hudson River road, which had a dingy station 
at Ninth Avenue and 29th Street, or from the east 
by the New Haven road, which had an even dingier 
station at Fourth Avenue and 27th Street (where 
the Madison Square Garden now stands). Early 
in the morning or late in the evening the drums 
rattled past our door and the fifes shrilled out, since 
all the countless thousands were hurried forward 
from the cars to the ferry, no matter what the 
hour when the several organizations might reach 
the city. 

One regiment I recall with special distinctness, 



52 THESE MANY YEARS 

because I saw it go and I saw it come back. To 
the massive music of ' John Brown's Body' it marched 
past us more than a thousand strong, and I was 
told that every man in its ranks was over six feet, 
stalwart loggers all of them, from the woods of 
Maine; this must have been early in the summer of 
1861, and they must have been ninety-day men, for 
in the fall they returned, a scant three hundred, all 
that the swamps of Virginia had spared. 

The departure of the Seventh in the first month 
of the war I long believed that I had seen with my 
own eyes — so believing, perhaps, because of the 
impression produced by Theodore Winthrop's viva- 
cious description. But when, just fifty years later, 
in April, 1911, the regiment repeated its famous 
march of April, 1861, it started from its old armory 
in Third Avenue, opposite the Cooper Union; and 
then I discovered that I had deceived myself into 
supposing that it had somehow passed our house in 
Fifth Avenue, half a mile farther up-town. This is 
an instance of the danger of remembering what 
never happened; and I shall have another example 
to cite when I come to record my memories of the 
downfall of the empire in Paris, in September, 1870. 

For four wearing and wearying years thousands 
of troops swung along briskly in their way to the 
war; and now and then a few hundreds retraced 
their steps toward their distant homes. But I was 
in New York only the first and the last years of the 
four, spending the two intermediate years at a 
boarding-school out of town. 

Of my several teachers at Mr. Anthon's school, 



EARLY SCHOOL-DAYS 53 

or of the studies prescribed for me, I have no clear 
memory — tho I do recall one pleasing custom, 
that of bestowing little silver medals at the end of 
the school-year, every medal engraved with the 
name of the study in which the recipient had ex- 
celled. The diligent students might win more than 
one of these tokens if they were superior in diverse 
departments of learning. But an unbreakable tra- 
dition imposed upon Mr. Anthon the obligation of 
giving at least one medal to every boy, no matter 
how sadly he might have lacked application. Thus 
it was that at the end of my first year when I was 
only eight years old I proudly exhibited to my 
parents a tiny silver maltese cross which declared 
that I had distinguished myself in "English Gram- 
mar," a subject certainly as little attractive to me 
as any other. And at the end of my second year 
I brought back another of these rewards of merit, 
inscribed "Good Conduct." When my father came 
home this was displayed to him, with a certain 
diffidence on my part, since I was well aware that 
my weekly reports had not altogether justified this 
reward. My father looked at it rather doubtfully; 
and then he took from his pocket a letter that he 
had received that very morning from Mr. Anthon, 
saying that I was not profiting by his instruction as 
fully as I might, and that he thought, therefore, I 
had better be sent to a boarding-school, where there 
would be fewer distractions to interfere with my 
application to my studies. 



CHAPTER IV 
LATER SCHOOL-DAYS 



WHEN I strive to decipher and to interpret 
the palimpsest of my past, and as an 
elderly man to discover what manner of 
strange being I must have been as a young boy, I 
am regretfully compelled toward the conviction 
that I was none too easy to get on with, and that I 
must have been often rather trying to my parents, 
as well as to my teachers. My father may have 
had ample reasons of his own for sending me away 
to boarding-school, in addition to those supplied 
by Mr. Anthon. It seems to me now that if I could 
to-day meet myself as I then was, the association 
might not be altogether agreeable for the elder of 
us. Under my sexagenarian scrutiny the little lad 
of less than ten takes on the image of a spoilt child, 
lazy, wilful, and inconsiderate. No longer can I 
recognize the good boy of the Mississippi river- 
boat, and I ask myself whether the change for the 
worse may not have been the result of less frequent 
applications of the maternal slipper, and of the 
ancillary india-rubber shoe. 

For me discipline was plainly "indicated," as the 
physicians say; and perhaps this was the motive 
which governed my father in sending me to a mili- 

54 



LATER SCHOOL-DAYS 55 

tary school at Sing Sing, founded by a former 
West Pointer, by the name of Churchill. More 
probably, however, my father chose Churchill's 
because it was recommended by friends whose sons 
had been there. I was to enter in the fall; and in 
the spring we went up to examine the school and to 
be spectators of the final parade drill of the four 
companies into which the fifty boys were divided. 
On this occasion the word of command was given 
by an old boy about to leave the school to enter 
Harvard — J. Hampden Robb, who was the son 
of a friend of my father's, and who afterward served 
as lieutenant-governor of New York, in which office 
he led the movement for rescuing Niagara Falls. 
Two sons of Governor Fish were already entered, 
and when I came back in the fall to begin work, I 
had the good fortune to share a room with Hamilton 
Fish, Jr., and with Stuyvesant Fish. 

I was only nine when I went to Sing Sing; I 
was only eleven when I escaped from it; and I had 
a more or less unhappy two years there. The only 
son of indulgent parents, I was probably conceited 
and bumptious; and the elder boys indulged in 
more bullying than was beneficial for the proper 
correction of these defects in my character. I was 
the smallest boy in the school except three, and 
with these smaller boys my relations were ever 
friendly in spite of the fights into which we were 
forced. We were awakened every morning by the 
sudden roll of the drum, and we had to get up as 
early on Sundays as on week-days. This left a long 
and empty interval between breakfast and church, 



56 THESE MANY YEARS 

an interval which invited the idleness of the older 
boys to the devising of mischief. One of their 
many inventions, kept in working order Sunday 
after Sunday, was to herd the smaller boys into the 
gymnasium and to compel them to combat. Under 
this practice my early pugnacity speedily departed. 
It was soon found that I was a little more than a 
match for the boy below me in stature, and therefore 
the two smallest boys were set on me at once, I 
being permitted the privilege of setting my back 
to the wall so that they could assault me only from 
the front. In spite of this privilege it was easily 
discovered that the pair were a little more than a 
match for me. I cannot help thinking that it speaks 
well for all four of us youngsters that these Sunday 
encounters did not interfere with our week-day 
friendliness of association. 

When the warmer days of early summer came 
the whole school was marched down to the Hudson 
River, to a little bay with a sandy, shelving shore; 
and here we went in swimming. Now, it was an 
unfortunate fact that I had never before entered 
into open water; and altho my father had been in 
his youth a sturdy swimmer, he had not caused me 
to acquire the art. At Churchill's it was the tra- 
ditional prerogative of every old boy to duck every 
new boy three times, and on this first occasion of 
my "going in swimming" I suffered severely from 
my inexperience. With the serenely unconscious 
cruelty of youth, I was seized without warning by 
boy after boy, and thrust under water again and 
again until I was almost unconscious. If I did not 



LATER SCHOOL-DAYS 57 

then come near drowning I certainly thought so at 
the time. Altho I come of seafaring stock, and altho 
I now enjoy nothing better than to withstand the 
breakers at Narragansett, the impression made on 
me by this ducking when I was only ten has been 
so indelible that to this day I cannot find my head 
under water without a return of my unreasonable 
juvenile terror. 

The painful submersions were repeated merci- 
lessly at every one of our trips to the river that 
summer; and all the next winter the dread of what 
was in store for me when the time should come for 
the school to go down to the river oppressed me like 
a nightmare. And thus it was that when the late 
spring of 1863 arrived, and a visit to the bathing 
beach loomed nearer and nearer, I ran away. I had 
only pocket-money enough to carry me a short dis- 
tance on the railroad; so I went to Cozzen's, where 
my grandfather was staying. He sympathized with 
my tale of woe; but he bade me go back to school 
at once. In fact, he took me across the river to 
Garrison, and put me on the train. But he had 
supplied me with money, and when the train stopped 
at Sing Sing I kept my seat. Two hours later I was 
back in my own home in New York. And when 
my father arrived that evening he found awaiting 
him a telegram from Mr. Churchill, stating that it 
was a rule of the school never to take back a boy 
who had run away. 

This must have been in June, when the family 
had already gone up to Saratoga; and there my 
father took me with him. We had comfortable 



58 THESE MANY YEARS 

rooms in the "cottage-wing" of the United States 
Hotel. That was the summer when the Civil War 
was coming to its climax, and when the cry of the 
American people was (in Holmes's apt phrase) for 
Bread and the Newspapers — only the newspapers 
could not satisfy the feverish craving for immediate 
information about all the incessant happenings, on 
any one of which might hang the fate of the nation. 
In the first month that I was at Saratoga, playing 
peacefully with the other boys under the ample 
shade of the huge trees which branched loftily over 
the inner grounds of the hotel, Grant took Vicks- 
burg, and Lee was repulsed at Gettysburg. The 
taking of Vicksburg I must have heard about at the 
time, but it did not impress itself upon me, over- 
shadowed as it was by the mighty struggle at Gettys- 
burg, in the next State to us, and only a few hundred 
miles away. The strain of those three days of wait- 
ing, the terrific tension of anxiety, was felt even by 
the youngest of the hundreds who filled the im- 
mense hotel. 

The telegraph office was directly opposite our 
rooms on the southern side of the U-shaped inner 
court of the hotel; and there was always a crowd 
clustered about the bulletin-board, to which the 
operator affixed the latest telegrams as fast as he 
could take them off the wires. That knot of men 
and women, waiting hour after hour, was now larger 
and now smaller, but it never melted away during 
all my waking hours in those three days of dreadful 
doubt. Sometimes a sudden cheer broke out, caught 
up by those who came hurrying over the lawns, 



LATER SCHOOL-DAYS 59 

and sometimes there fell suddenly a chill silence 
almost as startling, after which I could see little 
groups talking sadly in whispers. No matter how 
young we were then, no one of us who lived thru 
that week of alternate hope and fear can ever for- 
get it. 

II 

In the fall of 1863, when I was eleven, I was sent 
to another day-school in New York, the Charlier 
Institute, which occupied two connecting dwellings 
on the south side of 24th Street, beyond Fourth 
Avenue and nearer to Lexington — both of them 
still standing as I revise this chapter in 1917. Elie 
Charlier was a Frenchman, and French was sup- 
posed to be the language of the school. In French 
we studied arithmetic, altho we had our Latin and 
Greek lessons in English. French we were expected 
to speak to each other even in our play -hours; and 
we were required to confess every day at the end of 
school whether or not we had broken this rule, and 
to declare how many words of English we had al- 
lowed ourselves. I feel sure that many of us failed 
to make a practice of the complete confession which 
should precede absolution; and that most of us 
kept rather the letter of the law than its spirit. 
When we failed to find at the tip of our tongues the 
needed but unfamiliar word of the foreign language, 
we were prone to satisfy our consciences by giving 
a French pronunciation and perhaps also a French 
termination to the more immediately available 
English word. 



60 THESE MANY YEARS 

Yet, even if our speech was often only a pitiably 
hybrid Gallic, the constant effort to speak French 
was its own reward; and I must then have acquired 
at least the rudiments of the colloquial French of 
which I found myself later in possession — a col- 
loquial French often ungrammatical enough, but 
generally idiomatic and almost unfailingly fluent. 
That some of my schoolfellows long retained our 
old trick of piecing out our French with approxi- 
mate English vocables was revealed to me half-a- 
dozen years later when I was seeing the old year 
out and the new year in at Delmonico's with several 
of my Columbia classmates. Catching sight of me, 
a Charlier friend joined us, moving from the next 
table, the waiter of which he summoned with the 
outlandish inquiry: "Oil sont ces deux drinks que 
j'ai ordonne?" Then he turned to me with a com- 
placent smile and said: "I suppose you don't keep 
up your French now, eh?" 

We used to take our lunches with us to Charlier's, 
and when the weather permitted we marched in 
columns of two under the eyes of accompanying 
teachers across Fourth and Madison Avenues to 
Madison Square, where we ate what we had brought, 
and where we played games afterward, or did as 
we pleased for half an hour. Madison Square was 
then girt in by iron railings, as was also Union 
Square; and as it was surrounded then only by 
residences, with few or no shops in the vicinity, 
we had it to ourselves as a playground. I got 
along well enough with my new schoolmates, altho 
I have an impression that I was not really popular. 



LATER SCHOOL-DAYS 61 

The overt pugnacity of my Anthon years had been 
tamed by the hardness of my Churchill years; and 
my Charlier years were in the main peaceful. I can 
recall only one quarrel with a schoolfellow, fought 
out fairly in a secluded corner of Madison Square, 
half hidden by thick shrubbery. This was in the 
northeast corner, opposite the sunken lot, which 
Leonard Jerome was then utilizing as a private 
skating-rink, and which was soon to serve as the 
site of the second home of the Union League Club. 

During the first winter that I spent at Charlier' s 
the great fair was held in New York for the benefit 
of the Sanitary Commission, the forerunner of our 
modern Red Cross societies. My father, altho he 
had voted for Bell and Everett, and altho he had 
had doubts as to the fitness of Abraham Lincoln for 
the presidency, was intensely loyal to the Union. 
He was a member of the executive committee of the 
fair; and he gave a thousand dollars in gold. With 
his habitual shrewdness he saw to it that this gift 
should be as profitable as possible. He asked Mr. 
Tiffany to send it to Paris and to expend it in the 
articles most likely to be salable at the fair; and 
then he arranged — that is, I remember that he 
tried to do so, and I believe that he succeeded — 
he arranged with the Secretary of the Treasury to 
admit these articles free of duty, with the result 
that his thousand dollars in gold brought into the 
coffers of the Sanitary Commission between five and 
ten thousand dollars in currency. 

The fair was held in a temporary wooden building 
in 14th Street, just east of Sixth Avenue, and it 



62 THESE MANY YEARS 

had an annex on the north side of Union Square in 
another wooden building connected with the square, 
the gates of which were kept closed while the fair 
was open. And every night in the fountain in the 
square a strange spectral figure could be seen — for 
an extra fee; this was the illusion then recently 
devised in England, where it was known as "Pep- 
per's Ghost." One of the attractions of the fair 
was a beautiful sword, with its ornate scabbard, to 
be presented to the Union general who should re- 
ceive the most votes, costing a dollar each. There 
was a close contest between General Grant and 
General McClellan, who had a large following here 
in New York, especially among those who held that 
the war was a failure. On the last evening that the 
books were open in which every voter had to in- 
scribe his name as he recorded his choice, the excite- 
ment was most intense, since the two leading can- 
didates were almost neck and neck. That was the 
evening when I was taken to see the war-dances of 
a group of Indians who had been brought east as 
an added allurement; and I was allowed to spend a 
hoarded dollar of my pocket-money on a vote for 
the sword. As I signed my name the bystanders 
leaned forward to see who was candidate of my 
choice. When I wrote "Grant" in the proper 
column a disgusted admirer of General McClellan 
growled out: "What will you be when you grow 
up?" I was only twelve, but I had imbibed the 
loyal spirit of our household, and I promptly re- 
sponded: "I won't be a copperhead anyhow !" 
My stay at Charlier's lasted three years, until I 



LATER SCHOOL-DAYS 63 

was fourteen; and then my school-days came to an 
end. As I look back now over my education at 
Anthon's and Churchill's and Charlier's I cannot 
recall any really stimulating teacher, any instructor 
who evoked in me the desire to do my best. My 
father had tried to choose good schools for me, and 
it may be that these three were among the best 
private schools for boys then existing in or near 
New York. If this was the case, there was at that 
time in this region no school for boys as good as the 
school for girls which my mother had attended a 
quarter of a century earlier. And if I may judge by 
a recent visit to a boys' high school, the teaching 
to be obtained in the best private schools of New 
York fifty years ago was far inferior to that now to 
be had in the public schools — inferior not only in 
the range of studies, but also and more especially 
in the quality of the teaching. 

Ill 

In the summer of 1866 my father took his family 
over to Europe to stay nearly a year and a half. 
We made the voyage out on the Scotia, then the 
greyhound of the Atlantic, in which I was to make 
two later crossings, and which I was to behold for 
the last time, in 1900 at Gibraltar, degraded into a 
coal-hulk, and reminding me of a worn-out race- 
horse reduced to drawing an ash-cart. The Scotia 
was commanded by Captain Judkins, who was be- 
lieved to be an excellent sailor, and who was known 
to be an exasperating shipmate because of his brusk- 



64 THESE MANY YEARS 

ness and bad manners. To one lady who asked him 
if it was always foggy off the Banks, he responded 
gruffly: "How do I know? I don't live there." 
To another lady who made some other inquiry of 
a similar kind, he snorted out a curt "Ask the 
cook !" To which the fair inquirer suavely returned : 
"I beg your pardon, but am I not speaking to the 
cook?" 

Captain Judkins not only treated his passengers 
with scant courtesy, he took an attitude equally 
domineering with his fellow captains in command 
of other ships, and as a result of this arbitrary dis- 
regard of the rights of other men he came very near 
causing the loss of the Scotia on this July voyage, in 
1866, as I can testify. When we were skirting the 
coast of Ireland and making ready to enter the 
harbor of Queenstown, another ship unexpectedly 
steamed out from behind the headlands. By the 
rule of the sea it was the plain duty of our boat to 
swing to the right and to leave sea-room between 
us and the rocky shore. But Captain Judkins blew 
his whistle sharply and went on unswervingly, 
heading to the left. The captain of the outgoing 
vessel, secure in his rights, blew his whistle to warn 
us and kept on his course. As a result of Captain 
Judkins's wilful obstinacy the two boats were for 
several minutes headed straight for each other. A 
collision seemed to be almost unavoidable. I hap- 
pened to be standing in the bow, and I can hear 
again the shrieks of a few of the more timorous 
passengers on the upper deck behind me. With 
the stolidity of a healthy boy I did not realize the 



LATER SCHOOL-DAYS 65 

danger, altho I could not help seeing it; yet I think 
I was dimly conscious of the Vision of Sudden 
Death. Suddenly Captain Judkins changed his 
mind and turned the Scotia to the right into her 
proper course, and a minute or two later the out- 
ward-bound ship passed us within two or three hun- 
dred feet. 

French I had begun to speak (after a fashion) at 
Charlier's; and to German I was introduced on 
the Scotia the first day out. As we intended to be 
absent for more than a year, my father had engaged, 
as a tutor for me, Charles Carroll, who had been a 
classmate of President Eliot's at Harvard, and who 
was afterward professor of modern languages at 
New York University. Carroll was a clever man, 
well read, abundant and apt in anecdote, an admira- 
ble elocutionist, and unusually well equipped to 
impart instruction in German and in Italian, as 
well as in French. For some reason, he did not 
take his duties toward me very seriously; not that 
he neglected me, but rather that his responsibility 
for me was subordinate to his own incessant effort 
for mastery over rebellious foreign tongues. To his 
mind the whole duty of man was summed up in the 
replenishment of vocabulary, the conquest of idiom, 
and the acquisition of accent. I was present at a 
linguistic triumph which filled his soul with exultant 
joy. When we were in Lucerne, a little later that 
summer, he took me up the Rigi on horseback, the 
railroad not having yet been planned. On the ascent 
we fell into company with a lady and her daughter, 
also on horseback. She made some inquiry about 



66 THESE MANY YEARS 

the hotel at the Kulm, and as she used German, 
Carroll continued the conversation in that language. 
Hearing him speak to me in English, she changed 
the talk to English. Then some French phrase, 
accidentally used, caused them to drop into French. 
Finally I heard them conversing in Italian. Then 
she looked at Carroll and at me. "Your young 
friend," she said, "is English, of course, or American. 
But you ? What are you ? I am a Swiss, daughter 
of a hotel-keeper, wife of a hotel-keeper, and I have 
to speak German and French, Italian and English. 
Now, I have heard you use all four of those lan- 
guages and I haven't the slightest idea which is your 
native speech." 

It was quite like Carroll not to enlighten her, and 
to leave her guessing as to his nativity. From him, 
during the six or eight months that he remained 
with us, I picked up the rudiments of German and 
of Italian; and in the course of our sojourn in Ger- 
many and in Italy during the next few months, I 
acquired the simple vocabulary which enabled me 
to serve as interpreter for my father in the curiosity- 
shops of Venice and of Vienna. On later visits I 
have discovered that I can still command a few of 
the most necessary vocables, enough to buy my 
tickets and to order a meal. Yet my personal 
control even over this elementary vocabulary is 
not indisputable, as I discovered on my last visit 
to Venice, when what I wanted was cold milk, 
latte freddo, and what I asked for was a warm bed, 
letto caldo. 

The Scotia landed us at last in Liverpool; and we 



LATER SCHOOL-DAYS 67 

spent a few days in London. Carroll took me on 
the regular round of sightseeing; and he also re- 
galed me with a morning performance at the Al- 
hambra, where I first beheld the daring and grace- 
ful performance of Leotard on the flying trapeze 
which he had invented. From London we went to 
Paris, then to Switzerland, where my father took 
a cure at Baden, a quaint little town nestling in 
an elbow of the Limmat. From Switzerland we 
went north into Germany, then in the throes of the 
Seven Weeks' War between Prussia and Austria. 
We were in Homburg, in Nassau, when the Prussian 
troops marched in and took possession. It was a 
peaceful, or at least an unresisted, invasion; and 
the sole memory it has left me is that one afternoon 
on the outskirts of Homburg our carriage had to be 
drawn on one side of the road out of the way of a 
regiment of Prussian soldiers, marching at ease and 
singing 'Upidee-Upida.' 

The bloodless capture of Homburg did not in 
any way interfere with the amusements of that 
fashionable summer resort, for the gambling rooms 
were open every night and every afternoon. I was 
only fourteen, but I was tall for my years; and my 
father never checked me from wandering all over 
the Kursaal. I listened to the music; I inspected 
the polyglot crowds; and I watched with unfailing 
fascination the varying expressions of the gamblers 
who thronged about the roulette and the trente-et- 
quarante tables. I used to stand just on the outer 
fringe of the players and plan what I would do 
next if I were playing. Oddly enough, I was never 



68 THESE MANY YEARS 

tempted to play; I suppose I inherited my father's 
distaste for "speculation," for the winning or losing 
of money by blind luck. I came in time to know 
the names of a few of the steady players, those who 
arrived when the tables were uncovered, and whom I 
left still hard at work when I went back to the hotel. 

The one face I can recapture is that of a brother 
of the Khedive of Egypt, who came in nearly every 
afternoon at about the same hour, accompanied by 
two aides in uniform. He wore the fez above his 
dark, sullen, imperturbable features. A seat would 
be found for him at the roulette table and he would 
settle himself squarely, with the two aides immedi- 
ately behind his chair. Then, without a word or a 
turn of the head, he would raise his right hand up 
to his shoulder, and the aide on that side would give 
him a black portfolio rilled with thousand-franc 
notes. When he had staked all these notes and 
lost them, he would raise his left hand up to his 
shoulder, again without a word or a turn of the 
head; and the aide on that side would give him a 
second portfolio, also filled with thousand-franc 
notes, which might soon go the way of their pred- 
ecessors in the first portfolio. Of course this stolid 
and gloomy Turk must have had his winning days; 
but I was never present when he did not lose. 

Nor was my ardent observation of the gambling 
table confined to Homburg. In that s&me summer 
of 1866, we spent a warm week in Baden-Baden. 
We must have visited this famous watering-place 
when it was most famous, or at all events before 
its fame had begun to fade. It was the favorite 



LATER SCHOOL-DAYS 69 

summer resort of the fast and fashionable folk of 
Paris. In Baden-Baden, as at Homburg, I think I 
enjoyed the walks and the drives in the environ- 
ing woods almost as much as I did my vicarious 
gambling. I was already beginning to observe hu- 
manity, not only those bound to the wheel of for- 
tune, but those who came only to look on at the 
gambling, to go out to the races, to see and to be 
seen. I recall that the Russians were almost if not 
quite as numerous as the Americans. A few years 
later, when I first read 'Smoke,' I was delighted to 
discover that Turgenieff had chosen the very year 
of my visit for the opening episode of his veracious 
and appealing study from life; and as I ran thru 
the early pages my memory supplied the landscape 
with figures that could most exactly illustrate this 
masterpiece of nineteenth-century fiction. 

IV 

Late in the autumn of 1866 we went down to 
Italy; we spent Christmas in Florence; and we 
arrived in Rome to pass the first two or three months 
of the new year. Our hotel was not far from the 
Piazza del Popolo, within ear-shot of the barracks 
sheltering a regiment of the French garrison, which 
held Rome for the Pope; and two or three times a 
day the echo of their bugles floated down to us. 
There were not a few old friends of our family in 
Rome that winter, of whom I most distinctly recall 
the distinguished figure of Townsend Harris, maker 
of the treaty which opened to the world the island 



70 THESE MANY YEARS 

kingdom of Japan. To these American friends were 
soon added Italian acquaintances, including a cer- 
tain Prince Massimo, a member of a family so old 
that it claimed to derive its descent and even its 
name from a Pontifex Maximus of the second or 
third century. This kindly old gentleman lingers 
in my memory as the first prince I had ever spoken 
to. He came to our balcony during the last days of 
the carnival, when the maskers were throwing bou- 
quets and scattering confetti, and when the horses 
were loosed for their mad dash down the Corso, 
thickly lined with commingled citizens and sight- 
seers. On the final evening after the last of the 
moccoletti had burned itself out, my father smilingly 
told us that the prince had asked him if he did not 
care to have a title, baron or count, explaining that 
its acquisition would be a simple matter, since all 
that my father would have to do would be to give 
a hundred thousand lire or so to some hospital, 
whereupon the Pope, in recognition of this gift, 
would be glad to grant a patent of nobility. 

Another balcony than ours attracted my atten- 
tion during those carnival days — that of the de- 
throned sovereigns of Naples; and I took a juvenile 
pleasure in gazing up at the young Queen turned out 
of her kingdom, a beautiful sister of the beautiful 
Empress of Austria. I think we also beheld the 
royal exiles more than once when we drove out on 
the desolate campagna to see the hounds meet, not 
far from the tomb of Cecelia Metella — where 
Locker-Lampson tells us in rime he had "left his 
umbrella." With my parents I went to the work- 



LATER SCHOOL-DAYS 71 

shops of the Vatican, which were then engaged in 
finishing the interminable series of portraits of the 
Popes to fill the two or three still empty panels high 
up on the walls of St. John Lateran.*^ I was taken ^r 
also to Castellani's to see his Etruscan finds, and 
his own lovely reproductions and restorations. And 
there were visits also to the studios of various paint- 
ers and sculptors, American and Italian — the only 
one of which that I can now recall with certainty 
being that of W. W. Story. 

The American sculptor-poet, as he was then 
termed, was finishing the model of a ' Delilah,' 
which so pleased my father that he purchased it. 
I feel called upon to register, in these frank and 
artless confessions, the fact that this statue evoked 
my earliest effort at esthetic criticism, as pettily 
pedantic — in despite of my juvenility — as any of 
which I was ever to be guilty in my later years. 
Story had chosen for his statue the moment after 
Delilah had shorn Samson of his luxurious locks; 
and in the model the strength-giving tresses lay at 
her feet by the side of the scissors with which she 
had done the deed of treachery. With the brisk 
assurance of a youth of scant fifteen, I asked the 
sculptor if he was certain that the Hebrews had 
scissors in the days of the Judges. A sudden ex- 
pression of doubt came into his face as he looked 
down at me, and he hesitated a moment before he 
answered: "I think they did have scissors then — 
but I'm not at all sure. Perhaps it will be safer to 
change that pair of scissors into a razor. I know 
that they had razors at that time." 



72 THESE MANY YEARS 

While we were in Rome that winter my instinct 
for collecting, inherited probably from my father, 
who delighted in gathering beautiful objects in all 
the departments of art, and not sated by my child- 
ish efforts in New York to form a collection of 
postage-stamps, took a new turn; I was tempted 
by the constantly proffered results of incessant ex- 
cavations to spend most of my very liberal pocket- 
money in the accumulation of the bronze coins 
of Rome, republican, imperial, and papal. I aspired 
most ardently to complete a set of the smaller 
silver coins with the images and superscriptions 
of the Twelve Caesars. As a result of my re- 
searches I aroused an interest in Roman history 
which has survived half a century as a source of 
enduring pleasure; and I also made what I believed 
to be a discovery. I knew that in adopting its 
system of decimal coinage the French republic had 
followed the example of the American republic; 
and I now found out that the Roman scudo, with its 
ten pauls each worth ten baioccos, had come into 
existence before our dollar, with its ten dimes each 
worth ten cents, and that therefore the Papal 
States had anticipated the United States in devising 
a scientific and labor-saving system of measuring 
pecuniary values. 

I was moved to write a little article to set forth 
the facts I had found out; and my father sent this 
to New York and had it printed in a newspaper, 
paying me ten dollars for it. So it was that I made 
my first appearance in type when I was only fifteen. 
I think that the article did not get into print until 



LATER SCHOOL-DAYS 73 

after we had left Rome for Naples, and perhaps 
not until after we had gone north thru Venice (still 
in the hands of the Austrians) to Vienna, where we 
arrived in a spring snow-storm. And it was early 
in the spring that we returned to Paris, where the 
Exposition was about to open. 



My father had taken a house in Paris, in the Rue 
de la Baume, a quiet offshoot of the Faubourg St. 
Honore. The house belonged to a Prince Trou- 
betzkoi; and it stood, as the French phrase has it, 
"between court and garden," that is to say, there 
was a spacious courtyard in front for carriages to 
drive in, and there was an exiguous garden of half 
an acre in the rear of the house, with a few shrubs 
and a dozen towering old trees. The ground floor 
contained a suite of rooms for entertaining, leading 
up to a superbly spacious music-room; but on the 
floor above there was only one decent bedroom, all 
the others being scarcely larger than closets. But 
there was a large stable; and my father sent to New 
York for the four-in-hand of beautifully matched 
Kentucky horses which he drove with assured skill. 

The year 1867 saw the culmination of the spec- 
tacular splendor of the inglorious Second Empire; it 
saw also the downfall of the Mexican Empire, which 
Napoleon had started when the United States was 
otherwise occupied. The American colony had ar- 
ranged to have an unusually elaborate celebration 
of the Fourth of July, and the Pre Catalan had been 



74 THESE MANY YEARS 

engaged to serve as the rural frame of our festivities. 
My father was on the committee of arrangements; 
and as his deputy I had been in negotiation with 
the most accomplished of the manipulators of mar- 
ionettes in the theaters in the Champs Ely sees. 
Then came the startling news of the capture of 
Maximilian, and of his summary execution at 
Queretaro. The imperial court went into mourn- 
ing, and all festivities were suspended for a brief 
season. John Bigelow, then the American min- 
ister, received a hint that it would be taken as an 
act of considerate courtesy if we were to forego 
our Fourth of July celebration, and to my regret 
I had to go to the Champs Elysees to notify Anatole, 
le vrai guignol, that his services would not be re- 
quired by us. As some compensation for this dis- 
appointment, I persuaded him to copy out for me 
for a modest reward half-a-dozen of the master- 
pieces of his comic repertory; and this precious 
manuscript, in all the effulgence of its simplified 
spelling, is now preserved in the Dramatic Museum 
of Columbia University. 

All that summer Paris was an Inn of Strange 
Meetings; and all sorts and conditions of men 
passed before my boyish gaze. One afternoon 
Buchanan Read dropped in for a chat with my 
mother. I knew that he had painted her portrait 
ten years earlier, but I knew also that he had since 
written 'Sheridan's Ride/ a far more interesting 
production to a boy who had lived thru the war 
than any family portrait could then be. He was 
the first poet who had ever spoken to me, as the 



LATER SCHOOL-DAYS 75 

descendant of the Pontifex Maximus was the first 
prince. He seemed to me simple, gentle, and kindly, 
and when my mother told him that I was collecting 
autographs, he sat down at the library table and 
wrote out from memory one of his poems — not 
'Sheridan's Ride,' as I had hoped, but his own 
favorite lyric, 'Drifting': 

"My soul to-day 

Is far away, 
Sailing the Vesuvian Bay; 

My winged boat, 

A bird afloat, 
Swings round the purple peaks remote." 

Altho my mother had given up singing herself, 
she retained her liking for music; and the spacious 
music-room that Prince Troubetzkoi had built for 
himself was often put to its proper purpose when 
our house was gladdened by a visit from one or 
another of the three rival American amateur singers 
then vying with one another in Paris — Miss Fanny 
Reed, Mrs. Ronalds, and Mrs. Charles Moulton (now 
Mme. Hegermann Lindencrone) . I was taken to 
the Lyrique to hear Mme. Carvalho in 'Faust,' and 
to the Opera-Comique to hear Galli-Marie in 
'Mignon,' both of these operas then in the freshness 
of their novelty. I saw the walls of Paris plastered 
with staring portraits of the elder Sothern as Lord 
Dundreary, with his weeping whiskers and his single 
eye-glass; and I was taken to the Theatre Italien 
to enjoy the encounter between Dundreary and 
Asa Trenchard, most humorously and most pa- 



76 THESE MANY YEARS 

thetically impersonated by John T. Raymond. I 
saw also the glittering spectacles of 'Cendrillon' 
(with its twinkling torchlight procession) at the 
Chatelet, and of the 'Biche au Bois' at the Porte 
St. Martin (with a thin slip of a girl in a part 
of no significance, Sarah -Bernhardt) . I was per- 
mitted to be a spectator of both of the triumphant 
successes of the superabundantly successful Sardou, 
the 'Famille Benoiton' at the Vaudeville (then in 
its old home near the Bourse), and 'Nos Bons Vil- 
lageois' at the Gymnase. And I have an unfor- 
gettable memory of my first visit to the Theatre 
Frangais, where I had the delight of beholding De- 
launay and Favart and Got in Musset's 'On ne 
badine pas avec 1'amour ' ; and to this day I can hear 
again the wail of Mile. Favart as she spoke the final 
words which separate her forever from her lover: 
"Adieu, Perdican ! elle est morte." 

One afternoon, probably by the courtesy of Mr. 
Bigelow, we were permitted to attend a sitting of 
the Corps Legislatif; and by good luck we had the 
absolutely unexpected experience of seeing Thiers, 
then the leader of the little knot of the opposition, 
rise suddenly and make his way to the tribune, 
where he unsparingly denounced the policies of the 
empire, both civil and military. Altho we could not 
foresee it, that fiery speech of Thiers, delivered at 
the time of the Mexican disasters, really sounded 
the knell of Napoleon. But in those mid-months 
of 1867 a knell could scarcely have made itself 
heard above the deafening tintinnabulation of the 
joy -bells ringing out loudly day after day, and night 



LATER SCHOOL-DAYS 77 

after night. There was incessant entertaining on 
an extravagantly luxurious scale, not only by the 
imperial circle, but also by all the several foreign 
colonies. One evening my father and my mother 
went out to a big dinner, going on afterward to two 
receptions, and finally spending an hour or more 
at a ball; and it was between three and four in the 
morning when they got into the carriage, whereupon 
the groom touched his hat and asked : " Where now, 
madame?" 



VI 

Of course these nocturnal dissipations were denied 
to my tender years; and in compensation I had my 
diurnal visits to the Exposition itself, my father 
having presented me with a season ticket, authen- 
ticated by my photograph. Altho far surpassed in 
size by later international fairs, the Paris Exposition 
of 1867 has never been equalled in the convenience 
of its arrangements. It was held in the Champs de 
Mars; and the main building was most ingeniously 
composed of concentric oval galleries of iron and 
glass surrounding a garden. The inner hall which 
opened on this lovely example of urban garden- 
craft was given up to the fine arts, while every suc- 
ceeding outer ring was devoted to a separate de- 
partment of human achievement, the lofty outer 
gallery containing machinery in motion. This dis- 
tribution made it easy for any one who wished to 
examine all the exhibits of the same kind to ac- 
complish this without being distracted by any- 



78 THESE MANY YEARS 

thing else. While the several departments had each 
its annular hall, the several nations occupied sec- 
tions more or less triangular (like pieces of pie) ex- 
tending from the center of the ellipse to the periph- 
ery thereof, so that those who wanted to see all 
that any one country had to show walked not in a 
circle, but straight thru from the outer ring to the 
inner. 

Left to my own devices by the departure of 
Carroll, I was diligent in my attendance at the 
Exposition; and after looking up all the exhibits 
that I thought would be amusing, I determined to 
leave nothing unseen, so I conscientiously paced 
every alleyway, indoors and out. Generally I went 
alone, but I was sometimes accompanied by my 
schoolmate at Charlier's, Francis S. Saltus (later to 
make himself known as a poet). Once when we 
were passing an Algerian restaurant, the monotonous 
strumming within allured us to climb a spiral stair- 
case. At the top we beheld only a bare room with 
two musicians impassively striking their primitive 
instruments; and as we could detect nothing likely 
to reward us, we immediately corkscrewed down the 
stairs, only to be stopped by the guardian below 
when the alert manager shouted down: "They 
haven't taken anything" — "Ces messieurs riont pas 
consomme." So we were held to ransom for the 
consummation devoutly unwished. 

The culmination of the Exposition was the day 
when the prizes were distributed by the Emperor 
in person. This took place in the Palais de Plndus- 
trie built for the Exposition of 1856, used later for 



LATER SCHOOL-DAYS 79 

the annual Salon, and torn down in the final years 
of the nineteenth century to make room for the 
Grand and Petit Palais of the Exposition of 1900. 
The spacious and sumptuously decorated building 
was filled with thousands of interested spectators, 
all seated so that they could see the semicircular 
platform which tongued out from one side, and 
which was occupied by the Emperor, the Empress, 
the Prince Imperial, and their imperial, royal, and 
princely guests. Either before or after I had gazed 
on the Pope I had been held up to a window of the 
Hotel Westminster in the Rue de la Paix to behold 
the carriage, surrounded by the Cent Gardes in 
their resplendent cuirasses, which was conveying 
Queen Victoria, who had just arrived in Paris to 
pay a visit to her ally of the Crimean War. But 
it was no single monarch I was privileged to behold 
at that distribution of prizes; it was two or three 
score of them, all on exhibition at once, as large as 
life and quite as natural. A few days later my 
father had occasion to visit Dr. Evans, the Ameri- 
can dentist (who was only three years later to be 
the chief instrument in the escape of the Empress 
Eugenie from the Tuileries on the night of Septem- 
ber 4). "There must have been fifty or sixty royal- 
ties on that platform," said Dr. Evans to my father. 
"And there were only half-a-dozen that I haven't 
had by the nose !" 

It must have been at this time that the Emperor 
held a grand review at Longchamps in honor of the 
visiting sovereigns. All the garrison of Paris pa- 
raded past the grand-stand, artillery, cavalry, infan- 



80 THESE MANY YEARS 

try, voltigeurs, zouaves, turcos, with their several 
companies of bearded sappers, and their sturdy 
vivandieres. The climax of the review was the mass- 
ing of all the cavalry, regiment after regiment, on 
the opposite side of the race-course, to face at last 
toward the Emperor, and to charge at full speed 
across the plain, drawing up suddenly right in front 
of the sovereign, when every saber flashed out in a 
simultaneous salute. On the return from Long- 
champs that afternoon, as we were just entering 
the Bois de Boulogne, our carriage was less than a 
hundred yards behind that which conveyed the 
Emperor of the French and the Czar of Russia. 
So it was that we heard the startling report of the 
pistol, fired at the imperial carriage. And the anec- 
dote current at the time reported that each of the 
monarchs with commingled courtesy and self-control 
turned to the other and said: "Don't be alarmed; 
that was meant for me!' 9 



CHAPTER V 
PREPARING FOR COLLEGE 



IN November, 1867, we returned to New York; 
and the question of my more advanced educa- 
tion had to be decided. During our stay in 
Europe I had heard the name of the Ecole Poly- 
technique; and for some unguessable reason I was 
strangely attracted by it. Really I knew little or 
nothing about the far-famed French institution for 
the training of engineers, and I did not hear any 
loud personal call to the profession of engineering; 
nevertheless, I had got into the habit of asserting 
that I would like to go to the Ecole Poly technique. 
Of course I realize now that this boyish desire was 
absolutely impossible for various reasons, one of 
them being that I had no special gift for mathe- 
matics. Possessed by this vague aspiration, my 
thoughts had not turned toward any American 
college. 

When we were settled again in our New York 
home, I found that certain of my old schoolfellows, 
and in particular Stuyvesant Fish, my roommate 
at Churchill's, had just entered Columbia College 
as freshmen in the class of 1871. And I made up 
my mind immediately that I would like to go to 
Columbia as a member of this class. But our sixteen 
months' absence in Europe had deprived me of a 

81 



82 THESE MANY YEARS 

year's regular schooling; and altho, no doubt, it had 
been educationally advantageous in many ways, it 
had not provided me with the specific knowledge 
needed to enable me to enter college. With his 
customary kindness my father offered to get me a 
private tutor, so that I might prepare myself to take 
the examinations. During the winter I was to 
make sure of the information needed to enter, but 
I was also to cover as far as possible the work of the 
freshman year, which my friends already in college 
were simultaneously studying. With the aid of 
another tutor in the summer I hoped that I could 
fit myself to go up to Columbia in the fall to apply 
for admission to the sophomore class in which my 
friends would then be. 

What I proposed to do was to make up a year of 
preparation, and also to cover a full year of college 
work, and to do this in about eight months. It was 
not an impossible or even a very difficult feat for an 
ambitious lad of fifteen, diligent in study, and sternly 
resolved to accomplish what he had set out to 
achieve. The trouble with me was that I was not 
then ambitious or diligent or resolute. Hitherto I 
had taken life very easily, and I simply did not know 
what hard work meant. I had never learned how to 
learn; and at no one of the schools I had attended 
had I come under the influence of a born teacher 
who might have awakened my aspirations and roused 
me out of my happy-go-lucky cheerfulness. And as 
a result of this I did not take my new task seriously. 
I had an unhesitating confidence that all would go 
well somehow. 



PREPARING FOR COLLEGE 83 

I knew that I was "quick" and "clever," that I 
was considered to be a "bright" boy; and I did not 
suspect that this was an immense disadvantage, 
since it tended irresistibly toward superficiality. I 
was alert, and I easily acquired the outlines of any- 
thing I attacked; but I never mastered it thoroly; 
and I did not attack anything with genuine ardor. 
I had no training, no discipline, no power to compel 
myself to stick to any one thing until I had got the 
utmost out of it. I was very easy-going with myself; 
and I had never been toughened by a hard tussle 
with anything that seemed to me worth while. 
The deficiencies that I did not suspect when I was 
fifteen I discovered before I was twenty -five; and 
the training I failed to get from any teacher in my 
boyhood I had to get for myself after I had come to 
man's estate; and then it was not got without 
difficulty, since I had no habit of application to help 
me in overcoming my own inertia. But when a 
man is his own master he can be the hardest of task- 
masters. My change of heart was brought about 
by my awakening to the painful fact that so-called 
quickness and cleverness and brightness were pretty 
poor substitutes for thoroness — and that, like other 
substitutes, they were often only bounty -jumpers. 
I found out when I came to measure myself with 
others that superficial smattering was not a precious 
possession, and that honest labor was its own reward. 

What I most needed to make up was Latin, Greek, 
and mathematics, studies entirely neglected in Europe 
even while Carroll was with us. My father engaged 
an elderly Scotsman named Henderson to give me 



84 THESE MANY YEARS 

lessons in these subjects, wherein I had fallen be- 
hind. I had had Henderson as my classical teacher 
three years before at Charlier's, where he was still 
engaged. As his morning hours were thus occupied 
he could come to me only in the evening. I was 
supposed to study in the forenoon and to recite to 
him every night what I might have learned. There 
was a large room in the basement of our house, 
originally intended for a breakfast-room, and this 
was assigned to me as a study. It had two large 
closets; and in one of these a sneak-thief once con- 
cealed himself just before Henderson and I came 
down to our evening labors. After my lesson was 
over and Mr. Henderson had departed, the thief 
went up-stairs to my mother's bedroom and helped 
himself to her jewelry. Then he calmly went out 
the front door with his booty. We found out later 
that this sneak-thief had been prowling along Fifth 
Avenue, probably with no special design on our 
house. He had happened to see a tradesman's boy 
coming out of the basement door, and he had 
promptly bidden the lad to leave it open as he had 
a package to deliver. Once inside he had investi- 
gated my study, and had slipped into the closet 
when he heard us coming down for my lesson. And 
in this closet he had remained shut up for nearly 
two hours, while Henderson and I were indulging 
in the quest of the second aorist. When Hender- 
son was told about the hidden listener, he remarked 
that the sneak-thief had had gratuitous instruction 
in the classics. "If you catch him, I'll send him my 
bill!" 



PREPARING FOR COLLEGE 85 

II 

The jewelry stolen from my mother was valuable; 
yet the sneak-thief might have made a more satis- 
factory haul if he had been able to get into the 
drawing-room floor, which was a museum of objects 
of art, acquired in Rome and more especially in 
Paris, where my father had purchased many of the 
most important examples of goldsmith's work pre- 
pared for the Exposition. During our absence the 
house itself had been in the skilful hands of Chris- 
tian Herter (the father of Mr. Albert Herter); and 
it was due to Herter's suggestion that my father 
had commissioned Galland to paint eight exquisite 
panels for the music-room, four of the Seasons, and 
four of the Elements, single female figures floating 
in the air, each with a little child playing on the 
ground below. With his innate dislike for make- 
shifts and second-bests, my father had ordered in 
Paris curtains of real lace for the windows of the 
drawing-room — an externally visible evidence of 
taste which soon caused our home to be designated 
as "the point-lace house." 

Another and more enduring testimony of his judg- 
ment is St. Bartholomew's Church. My father had 
been elected a vestryman when the congregation oc- 
cupied a bare and barn-like edifice on the corner of 
Lafayette Place and Great Jones Street. When the 
movement up-town led to the purchase of a new 
site at Madison Avenue and 44th Street, the vestry- 
men had almost accepted an empty and yet tawdry 
design by a builder devoid of architectural training. 



86 THESE MANY YEARS 

My father in disgust went to his old friend, James 
Ren wick, the architect of Grace Church and of 
St. Patrick's Cathedral, and agreed to pay out 
of his own pocket for a more seemly design if the 
vestry should decline it. When Renwick and Sands 
had prepared the plans for the present church, my 
father procured bids from responsible builders, who 
stood ready to erect the more stately building for 
less money than the tasteless design was estimated to 
cost. In view of this combination of art and busi- 
ness, the other members of the vestry could not but 
see the advantage of intrusting the new church 
to the architects to whom my father had gone. 

My father's liking for the best attainable was il- 
lustrated again in St. Bartholomew's one morning 
after we had listened to a moving appeal for domestic 
missions. There were cards in all the pews with 
pencils attached, so that the emotional response to 
the sermon might be immediately translated into 
cash. These cards had separate spaces for Sub- 
scriptions, Donations, and for Annual Stipends of 
individual missionaries, and these stipends might 
be for any amount from five hundred dollars to a 
thousand. I saw my father fill out a card and drop 
it into the plate. On our way home I asked him what 
he had written, and he told me that he had made 
himself responsible for a stipend for three years. 
Then I returned that these stipends were for vary- 
ing sums, whereupon my father smiled. "If I am 
going to have a personal representative as a mis- 
sionary on the frontier," he said, "I want the best 
I can get." 



PREPARING FOR COLLEGE 87 

The meetings of the vestry of St. Bartholomew's 
were held in the evening at the houses of the several 
members; and when the personal business had been 
attended to, the host of the occasion led the way 
to a simple supper. At a gathering at the house of 
the vestryman who had been responsible for the 
ugly design, and who was also one of the most liberal 
contributors toward the cost of erecting the new 
church, a fellow vestryman, equally deficient in 
esthetic perception, made a complimentary remark 
about the somewhat emphatic decoration of the 
dining-room. "Yes," said the complacent host, 
"I've had the entire house done over. I asked who 
was the best decorator in New York, and they told 
me it was an Italian named Gariboldi. So I had 
him estimate on the whole job; and when I got his 
estimate, I told him to go ahead and do the best 
he could for half the money." Then he waved his 
hand in a curve of complete satisfaction. "And 
you see the result !" 

My father had other and more congenial friends; 
and of these the one I came to know best, and to 
like best, was Townsend Harris. He dined with us 
every Sunday; and we often saw him on the other 
days of the week. He was a man of the most pol- 
ished manners and of infinite tact; and it was not 
difficult to perceive the qualities which had enabled 
him to win the regard and the confidence of the 
suspicious Japanese. I regret greatly that I cannot 
now remember more of his experiences in the East. 
There was one which he did not like to recall but 
which I heard him tell at least once. When he had 



88 THESE MANY YEARS 

at last succeeded in persuading the Japanese to sign 
the treaty which opened the island-kingdom to citi- 
zens of the United States, he carried out the orders 
of our government to facilitate the negotiation of 
similar treaties by other powers, and before he left 
Japan he was instrumental in aiding the Prussians 
and the British to make their treaties. In recogni- 
tion of his courtesy he received the order of the 
Black Eagle from Prussia; and Queen Victoria 
wrote him an autograph letter of thanks, accom- 
panying it with a diamond snuff-box. Our Civil 
War was still raging when he departed from Japan; 
and the sympathies of the British in the Orient were 
strongly in favor of the South. So violent was their 
hostility to the United States that the captain of one 
of the British steamers which Mr. Harris had to 
take on his return home, one day chose to express 
his feelings by running up the Confederate flag; 
and this outrage to a representative of the American 
people was cheered by the British passengers. As 
a result of this insult Mr. Harris never thereafter 
set foot on British soil, or on a British ship. When 
we were going to Europe he always came down to 
the boat to see us off, if we were taking a French 
or a German line, but if we had chosen a British 
line he would bid us farewell the night before we 
sailed. 

Mr. Harris had a keen sense of humor, and he 
could not only take a joke on himself but also tell 
about it. During his brief stay in China, before 
going to Japan, he dined once with a distinguished 
mandarin; and by some mishap the expected in- 



PREPARING FOR COLLEGE 89 

terpreter failed to appear, thus leaving the guest of 
honor unable to tell his host how much he was en- 
joying the dinner, which was a succession of delicious 
dishes unknown to Occidental cookery. One of 
these dishes was apparently a game stew, which Mr. 
Harris supposed to be compounded of duck; and 
desiring to make sure of this, he indicated by ex- 
pressive pantomime that it was most grateful to 
his palate, and then pointing to it, he uttered an 
interrogative "Quack-quack-quack?" Whereupon 
his smiling host shook his head and gently responded : 
"Bow-wow-wow!" — thereby informing his guest 
that they had been feasting on the famous edible 
dog. 

To Mr. Harris, before he went to Japan, was due 
the founding of the first boys' high school, the Free 
Academy, now known as the College of the City of 
New York; and it was a fitting recognition of his 
foresight when the most important of the new build- 
ings of the city college received the name of Town- 
send Harris Hall. After his return to New York 
he was a constant frequenter of the Union Club, and 
as he had no liking for incessant discussion of the 
stock-market, he did not find there many congenial 
associates. There were a scant half-dozen old friends 
always glad of his society, and with them he drew 
apart. "We talk sense at one end of the room," 
he used to say, "while the rest of them are talking 
dollars at the other." He retained his faculties to 
the end of his long life ; but he came in time to have 
an unwarranted fear that he had outstayed his wel- 
come in the world. "I ought to have gone to the 



90 THESE MANY YEARS 

South Seas," I have heard him say, "before I was 
too old. There I should have been killed and eaten 
long ago." 

Ill 

I have already confessed that I did not take my 
studies as seriously as I ought to have done; and I 
permitted myself various distractions. One result 
of my thoro exploration of the Exposition had been 
my discovery of Voisin, the maker of magical ap- 
paratus; and my frequent visits to his dingy shop 
in the Rue Vieille du Temple had been to stimulate 
my earlier interest in conjuring; and I soon found 
more than one friend who shared my taste for the 
fascinating art of Robert-Houdin. From Paris I had 
also brought back implements for the exercise of the 
kindred art of juggling; in time I became fairly 
adept in hat-spinning and in keeping three or four 
brass balls in the air. A little set of puppet figures, 
also the spoil of my Parisian summer, was called 
into service almost as soon as I returned to New 
York, for I was rash enough to volunteer a Punch 
and Judy performance as a side-show in a fair for 
the benefit of the St. Barnabas Home. I was not 
sixteen when I made this first appearance as a show- 
man; and, strictly speaking, it was not an appearance, 
since I was concealed from view by the draperies 
dependent from the ledge from which Mr. Punch 
took the club to beat Mrs. Judy. 

I must record also that three years earlier while 
I was at Charlier's, some of my schoolmates had got 



PREPARING FOR COLLEGE 91 

up an imitation of one of the Ravel pantomimes, in 
which I was permitted to disport myself lugubriously 
as the clown; and after whitening myself for this 
part, I blacked up a little later to tap on the tam- 
bourine in an amateur minstrel show. I may an- 
ticipate to note that a year or two thereafter I 
played a low comedy part in a one-act farce, 'Turn 
Him Out.' These various histrionic efforts of mine 
cannot have been very exhilarating to their several 
audiences; but they were beneficial to me, as they 
convinced me that, whatever my native gifts might 
be, they certainly did not qualify me to persist in 
trying to act. My liking for the stage continued to 
grow; but I early became aware that if I was ever 
to make my way thru the stage door, it would be 
as an author and not as an actor. 

In Paris the preceding summer I had gone to a 
gymnasium in the Rue St. Honore and there I had 
been well taught. I had even progressed so far as 
to be able to accomplish the more elementary feats 
of the flying trapeze — that is to say, I could at least 
project myself from one trapeze and clinch the other 
as it swung toward me. Now in New York I be- 
came an assiduous frequenter of Gebhard's gym- 
nasium, on the top floor of 161 Fifth Avenue, at the 
corner of Broadway and 2£d Street. As I recited 
to Mr. Henderson in the evening and as I was sup- 
posed to study only in the morning, I had my 
afternoons to myself, and I spent nearly all of them 
at Gebhard's. I took lessons in fencing and in 
boxing from the special teachers who shared the 
ample floor-space of the gymnasium, altho in neither 



92 THESE MANY YEARS 

of these arts of offense and defense did I ever at- 
tain any high degree of skill. My chief interest 
was in the gymnasium itself, where I often had the 
companionship of professional acrobats assiduously 
practising in private the feats they were to perform 
in public. 

In the course of the winter a group of boys of my 
own age, working together afternoon after afternoon, 
not only gratified a strong liking for acrobatics, but 
also acquired a certain degree of skill. We followed 
the example of the occasional professionals who used 
the same apparatus and made a habit of practising 
always in the trunks and fleshings which gave com- 
plete freedom to our limbs. We did single and 
double trapeze acts; we achieved the giant-swing 
and the muscle-grind on the horizontal bar; we lay 
on our backs in the stand devised for the purpose, 
and strove to juggle a barrel with our feet; we 
learned to leap with the aid of the battoute board; 
and we built ourselves up into pyramids, in which 
I had to bear the weight of two or three others on 
my shoulders. When spring came we were so proud 
of our proficiency that we gave a set entertainment. 

A faded copy of our program, surviving mirac- 
ulously for nearly half a century, reminds me that 
this "First Annual Exhibition of the Amateur 
Gymnastic Club," took place at eight on the evening 
of Wednesday, April 15, 1868, and that the whole 
class began the first part by indian-club exercises, 
and then displayed their agility on the parallel bars, 
in horse-vaulting, on the flying rings, in the long 
jump, and the high jump, and finally on the hori- 



PREPARING FOR COLLEGE 93 

zontal bar. The class-leader on the parallel bars 
was Hermann Oelrichs; whereas in the long jump 
and in the high jump the others followed Charles B. 
Jefferson (the eldest son of Joseph Jefferson), and 
the writer of this record. In the second part the 
opening number was "Juggling by B. Matthews"; 
this was followed by a double-trapeze act, and a 
flying-trapeze act in which I had no hand, the inter- 
mediate number being "Grotesque Gymnastics, in- 
cluding the Enchanted Hats, Gymnastic Gyrations, 
and a Terrific Broadsword Combat, by the Corriero 
Brothers." The Corriero brothers were three in 
number, and the other two were Oelrichs and Jeffer- 
son, who were responsible for the carefully studied 
fight with combat-swords (very like that described 
in c Nicholas Nickleby'); and I took part in the 
earlier hat-spinning and in the "frog-leaps" and 
"porpoise-leaps" which masqueraded as gymnastic 
gyrations. The program wound up with "The Cy- 
clops by Eight Members of the Club " ; I recall this 
as an imitation of the "brothers act" of the Hanlons. 
The spectators of this first and last annual exhibi- 
tion of this gymnastic club were mainly our families 
and our friends, but there was also a sprinkling of 
the professional circus men who were accustomed 
to frequent the gymnasium. After most of our 
guests had departed and while we were talking 
things over preparatory to getting out of our tights 
and our "Leotard bodies," one of these circus men 
accosted me. "Say," he began, "are you one of the 
Corriero brothers?" I admitted it. "Well," he 
went on, "how would you three boys like to go on 



94 THESE MANY YEARS 

the road this summer under canvas?" The father 
of one of the Corrieros was the most popular actor 
on the English-speaking stage; the father of another 
was the head of Oelrichs and Co., the agents of the 
North German Lloyd; and the father of the third 
was then steadily engaged in buying expensive real 
estate. So the possible pecuniary rewards of a 
summer on the road under canvas were not over- 
whelmingly alluring to any one of us. But no mere 
money could measure our ecstatic delight at this 
professional recognition of our juvenile efforts. To 
this day I can recall the thrill that ran thru me as 
I heard this most gratifying proposal, and I can see 
again the joyous expression which came over the 
faces of Jefferson and Oelrichs when I transmitted 
the offer to them. In the life of any man such a 
moment of triumph can never be frequent. 

IV 

Gebhard's gymnasium did not take up the whole 
of the top floor of the building; and a large room on 
the north side was occupied as a studio by J. Q. A. 
Ward, the sculptor. Sometimes he would come out 
into the gymnasium in his gray blouse, stained with 
clay, and stand there silently watching as we swung 
on the flying rings or rolled over on the mat in por- 
poise-leaps. And one day when I was alone, because 
I had come early he accosted me. "Don't you want 
to help me?" he asked. "I'm at work on a statue 
of Shakspere for Central Park, and I can't get a 
model for the legs — at least I can't get one that 



PREPARING FOR COLLEGE 95 

suits me. I wish you would let me have the loan 
of your legs." Why it was that I refused this slight 
favor to a distinguished artist I do not now remem- 
ber; probably partly from boyish shyness and 
partly from boyish selfishness, preferring to be busy 
about my own acrobatic exercises than to stand 
motionless for the benefit of a sculptor. More than 
twoscore years after this foolish refusal, Ward's 
statue was chosen as the frontispiece of my volume 
on 4 Shakspere as a Playwright ' ; and then I regretted 
in vain that the work of my hand in my maturity 
was not also to be adorned by the reproduction of 
my legs in my boyhood. 

I can set down with more pleasure the record of 
my relations with another artist who came to the 
gymnasium either that winter or the next; this was 
Leotard, the originator of the flying trapeze. I have 
been told that his father was the manager of a swim- 
ming-bath at Bordeaux, and that he first practised 
his flights from one trapeze to another over the 
open water, into which he could fall without danger. 
He had perfected his evolutions thru space before 
he made his first appearances in Paris with his star- 
tling novelty. This was in 1863 or thereabouts; 
and the fame of it had instantly spread to America. 
The Hanlons swiftly dispatched one of their number 
to Paris to study Leotard and to bring back his 
method to New York; then they hired the Academy 
of Music and plastered all over the city the mysteri- 
ous word Zampillaero station, which they had caused 
to be concocted to describe the art of flying thru 
the air. The Hanlons were acrobats then, and not 



96 THESE MANY YEARS 

the pantomimists they became later; but they had 
already a keen feeling for theatrical effect. Only 
after all the other Hanlons had most cautiously 
tested the several trapezes, as tho the slightest in- 
accuracy of balance might involve the danger of 
death, did the Hanlon who was to emulate Leotard 
appear at last; he was enfolded in a flowing black 
cloak, and before casting this off to begin his act, 
he shook hands, solemnly and severally, with his 
brothers. 

Leotard was not only the originator of the flying 
trapeze, he was also its incomparable performer — 
incomparable in the manly beauty of his figure, in 
the easy certainty of his execution, and in the un- 
failing grace of all his attitudes. He came to Geb- 
hard's for private practice, and as he did not speak 
English, and as I had a fair fluency in French, I 
got to know him very well. He seemed to be a 
simple and modest fellow, with a keen understand- 
ing of his art; he had a feeling for it which I can 
now understand better than I did then, and which 
I can describe best by saying that he held himself 
to be a professor of beauty, an exponent of the grace- 
ful in action. Of course, he never formulated it in 
this fashion; but I am sure it is not an unfair de- 
duction from one of our talks. He had asked me 
to swing the second trapeze for him as he came for- 
ward on the first. I did so, and to my amazement 
I saw him holding by only one hand to the middle 
of the trapeze-bar, then letting go and catching the 
second trapeze in the center; he swung forward 
and on the backward movement he twisted suddenly 



PREPARING FOR COLLEGE 97 

and caught the bar of the first trapeze. That is to 
say, he had gone from the first trapeze to the second 
and then back to the first with the use of the right 
hand only. 

After I had expressed my wonder at this extraor- 
dinary feat, I said: "But why have I never seen 
you do that in public?" 

"No," he answered; "and you never will." 

And when I asked him why not, he replied: "I'll 
do it again. Watch me and you will see the reason." 

Then he did it again, and when he had dropped to 
the floor he looked at me and inquired: "Do you see 
now?" 

"Well," I responded, "it takes a pretty violent 
effort. With only one hand, you can't help being a 
little awkward." 

"That's it," he explained, "that's just it. It is 
very awkward — that is to say, it must be ungrace- 
ful. It is excellent for my own practice. But in 
public I must never make any violent effort. I must 
seem to be doing it easily; and I must always be 
graceful." 

This is why I have called Leotard an artist; and 
in his own line he was as rigidly bound by the 
eternal rules of his art as was Ward. And thus it 
was that in my boyhood I received from an acrobat 
an illustration of the abiding truth of the Horatian 
maxim that to conceal art is the highest art. 



98 THESE MANY YEARS 



Despite these distractions I made sufficient prog- 
ress with my studies to pass the entrance examina- 
tions to Columbia College late that spring; and in 
the summer when we went to Newport my father 
engaged another tutor to prepare me to present 
myself in the fall to pass the examinations which 
would admit me to the sophomore class. While 
we sometimes spent part of the summer at Saratoga, 
coming down to West Point for the last fortnight 
before returning to town, we were likely to go to 
Newport, where my father had more than once been 
on the point of purchasing a cottage. Generally he 
hired a house for the summer; but he recognized 
the truth of a remark once made to him by Mrs. 
Paran Stevens: "You see the cottagers have the 
inside track!" 

It was in the summer of 1864, four years earlier, 
that my father had taken me to call on an old 
friend of his who had a son of my own age; and 
thus it was that, when I was only twelve I made 
the acquaintance of W. C. Brownell, the only friend 
of my later manhood who is the son of a friend of 
my father's early manhood. In those Newport days 
of youth we met only infrequently; and our real 
friendship dates from a later time. When we came 
together again, he was one of the office staff of the 
Nation, and I an occasional contributor. 

It was, however, in this summer of 1868 that I 
took part in an inglorious raid, the result of the 



PREPARING FOR COLLEGE 99 

bitter feeling of hostility toward England which re- 
sulted from her attitude during the recently ended 
Civil War. One of a half-dozen other boys whom 
I then knew at Newport discovered that an English- 
man was occupying a cottage out near Ochre Point, 
and that he was flaunting his offensive nationality 
by flying the British flag over a tent on his lawn. 
We planned at once to make a nocturnal expedition 
to destroy the obnoxious banner; and one moon- 
light night we walked out to the offending house, 
sternly resolved to show the alien that the Union 
Jack had no right to be displayed on American soil. 
When we had arrived where the tent gleamed white 
in the moonbeams, we could not perceive the hated 
standard; and then we realized, too late, that we 
had come on a fool's errand, since the flag had, of 
course, been lowered at sunset. 

When the summer came to an end I could not but 
be aware that my studying had been desultory and 
unsatisfactory even to myself. It was with trepida- 
tion that I presented myself at Columbia as an 
applicant for admission to the sophomore class. 
My knowledge was so insufficient that I probably 
did not appreciate how inadequately I was equipped 
for the ordeal. Yet I was none the less disagreeably 
surprised when I went up to learn the result of my 
examination, and when I was informed by Professor 
Van Amringe that my application to enter as a 
sophomore was refused, and that I had, therefore, 
to join the entering freshman class. Of course, this 
was a most proper verdict of the faculty; and there 
was no good reason why I should not accept it — 



100 THESE MANY YEARS 

except that I had more friends in the class of 1871 
than I had in the class of 1872, and that therefore 
I wanted to be received as a sophomore. 

I went home to my father, who sympathized with 
my disappointment. The next morning he paid a 
visit to Columbia and had a long interview with 
President Barnard. What arguments he was able 
to use in a bad cause I cannot now guess; but he 
won his point, probably by the weight of his own 
personality. The president overruled the decision 
of the faculty and admitted me to the advanced 
standing I sought on the sole condition that I should 
take a tutor and make up the deficiencies in my 
preparation. 



CHAPTER VI 
UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 



THE college which I entered as a student in 
the fall of 1868 was a totally different insti- 
tution from the university of the same name 
in which I am now a professor; and to those who 
know Columbia in the first quarter of the twentieth 
century as one of the strongest and most coherently 
organized of American universities, it is not easy to 
convey an illuminating idea of the simplicity and 
isolation of Columbia College in the third quarter of 
the nineteenth century. The great university of the 
present is the logical development of the small col- 
lege of the past, little as they may seem to have in 
common; and as I look back now I perceive that it 
was in my senior year when there appeared the 
earliest sign of a transformation of the rigid tradi- 
tions accepted without cavil or comment when I 
was a sophomore. These traditions were survivals, 
inherited by the college of the nineteenth century 
from the college of the eighteenth century; and the 
college in the eighteenth century must have been 
more or less inferior to a high school of the best 
type in the twentieth century, with less liberality 
and with less richness of opportunity. 

A scant decade before I came to it Columbia had 

abandoned the group of buildings originally erected 

101 



102 THESE MANY YEARS 

for King's College, and taken possession of a de- 
serted deaf-and-dumb asylum on the block between 
Madison and Fourth Avenues and 49th and 50th 
Streets. That part of New York had then scarcely 
begun to be built up; neither St. Patrick's Cathedral 
nor the Grand Central Station was completed; and 
there were then foul cattle-yards just below the 
college, stretching from Madison to Fifth Avenue. 
Central Park was just finished after about fifteen 
years' work; but scarcely a house skirted its edges 
even along its southern side. The main building of 
the college was architecturally pretentious, but un- 
deniably shabby in its coat of dingy stucco; and this 
was flanked by two smaller edifices equally devoid 
of dignity and beauty. One of these smaller houses 
was the residence of a professor, whose wash was 
flaunted in our gaze at the beginning of every week; 
and the other provided a large bare room which 
served as a chapel, while the upper floor contained 
the library, such as it was. The main building had 
half a dozen classrooms; and here also was the 
office of the president, for whom an official residence 
of red brick and brown stone had been erected on 
the 49th Street front. Back on the corner of Fourth 
Avenue and 50th Street was an old sash-and-blind 
factory assigned to the recently established School 
of Mines. 

In my time there was no solidarity of sentiment 
between the undergraduates of the college and the 
students of the School of Mines; and I doubt if I 
then knew by sight more than three or four of the 
"Miners." Nor did we have occasion to meet the 



UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 103 

law students, since their school was more than two 
miles distant — in Lafayette Place. And only nom- 
inal was the connection of Columbia with the pro- 
prietary College of Physicians and Surgeons, which 
was almost equally remote — at the corner of 
Fourth Avenue and 23d Street. With the atten- 
dants at these other schools more or less attached to 
Columbia, the undergraduates of the old college had 
no points of contact, and sought none. We did not 
doubt that we were the sole representatives of Co- 
lumbia, and that all the others were merely outsiders. 

We might consider ourselves a select body, and 
we were certainly a very small community. First 
and last the class of 1871 may have had a scant half- 
hundred members; in the course of our four years 
not a few fell by the wayside; and we numbered only 
thirty-one when we graduated, at which time the 
junior class had thirty men, the sophomore twenty- 
three, and the freshman thirty -six, making the total 
undergraduate attendance exactly one hundred and 
twenty. We were not only far fewer than the 
senior class of to-day, we were also much younger. 
For example, I was nineteen when I graduated, nor 
was I the youngest by one or two; and the average 
age of the members of the class on entering was less 
than sixteen. 

It is to this comparative juvenility that I must 
ascribe the disorderly conduct of which we were 
now and then guilty, our occasional boisterous neg- 
lect of stated exercises, and our less frequent out- 
breaks of actual violence, even in our senior year, 
when handfuls of fine shot were thrown repeatedly 



104 THESE MANY YEARS 

at an unfortunate lecturer who had failed to win our 
respect. We were only boys after all; and we had 
none of the latter-day safety-valves for our animal 
spirits. It is true that there was a plot of grass 
under the trees where we could kick a casual foot- 
ball after hours; but this was the sole available out- 
let for our boyish energy. The area of our activities, 
educational and social, was almost as restricted as 
the space available for our physical exercises. Per- 
haps the simplicity of our life can be exemplified by 
a single fact: all the exercises of the institution were 
suspended whenever a trustee of the college died. 
Naturally we held it to be unfair and even mean 
for any trustee to die on a Saturday, and so cheat 
us out of our unexpected holiday. 

Henry James once pointed out that here in the 
United States in Hawthorne's youth there were 
lacking most of the constituent elements of romance 
as these might be cataloged on the European conti- 
nent, since we had no king and no court, no palaces 
and no castles, no cathedrals and no established 
church, no galleries and museums, no political so- 
ciety, and no sporting class. It would not be diffi- 
cult to draw up a list of things common in nearly all 
the colleges of the present which were totally absent 
from the Columbia of my early undergraduate days. 
We had no dormitories; we had no gymnasium and 
no athletic field, no swimming-pool, and no boat- 
house; we had no athletics at all, no track-teams, 
no crew, no baseball nine; we had no glee-club and 
no mandolin -club; we had no dramatics, no per- 
formances of plays ancient or modern; we had no 



UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 105 

intercollegiate debates; we had no college paper, 
daily or weekly; we had no student reading-rooms, 
nor had we any books that students were really 
expected to read. 

After listing the blanks in Hawthorne's back- 
ground, Mr. James suggested that "the natural re- 
mark in the almost lurid light of such an indictment, 
would be that if these things are left out, everything 
is left out." Then the acute critic added that "the 
American knows that a good deal remains." And 
we who were undergraduates at Columbia when it 
exhibited this "terrible denudation" know that a 
great deal remained, even if it is not easy for us to 
declare this remainder with precision. The back- 
ground might have its blanks, but after all the atmos- 
phere was not so very different from what it is now. 
We had the unconquerable spirit of youth, and 
we were possessed by a feeling of solidarity. We 
dumbly knew that we had entered into our inheri- 
tance — even if we were incapable of appreciating 
its value. 



II 

In so small a college the president was able to 
call all the students by name, and to give them 
personal attention. To him their discipline was 
intrusted, altho on occasion a student might be 
summoned to appear before the entire faculty. If 
we were late, it was to the president that we had to 
go to make our excuses. We had profound respect 
for Dr. Barnard; we knew him to be as kindly as 



106 THESE MANY YEARS 

he was distinguished; but we could not help perceiv- 
ing that he was very deaf — and there were those 
among us not unwilling to take unworthy advantage 
of this patent infirmity. More than once an under- 
graduate who lived a little way up the Hudson 
went into the president's office to ask forgiveness 
for his tardiness, raising his voice on certain words 
and lowering them on others. "I am sorry I was 
late this morning. I wish I could say that the train 
was behind time — but I can't." And to this the 
president would reply: "As the train was late, you 
are excused." There was even a story that, one 
year before my time, when Dr. Barnard himself 
gave the senior course on the 6 Evidences of Natural 
and Revealed Religion,' the class quartet used to 
gather at the far end of the long room and practise 
their part-songs, until the president was moved to 
complain about the constant buzzing of which his 
ears made him doubtfully conscious. 

Perhaps one reason why we behaved now and 
again as if we were unruly boys is that we were treated 
as boys. We had none of the liberty into which 
freshmen now enter when once they have matricu- 
lated. For us the college was only a continuation 
of the school we had just left, with no larger oppor- 
tunity, and with no change in the method of instruc- 
tion. The program of studies was rigidly restricted 
and it did not vary year after year. The whole 
undergraduate body was required to attend chapel 
at a quarter before ten; and there we found await- 
ing us the entire faculty, which consisted then of 
only seven professors. At ten our solid class went 



UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 107 

to its first recitation; at eleven it moved on for an- 
other; at twelve it presented itself before a third 
professor; and at one we were free for the rest of 
the day. When I say that we went to three recita- 
tions a day, I mean it; we recited exactly as we 
had done in school. We were expected to prepare 
so many lines of Latin and Greek, or so many 
problems in mathematics, or so many pages of the 
text-book in logic or in political economy; and in 
the classroom we were severally called upon to dis- 
gorge this undigested information. And it was in- 
formation that we were expected to acquire, rather 
than the ability to turn this to account and to think 
for ourselves. 

We were rarely encouraged to go outside the text- 
book; and no collateral reading was either required 
or suggested. We were not urged to use the library; 
indeed it might be asserted that any utilization of 
its few books was almost discouraged. The library 
was open only for one or two hours a day, after one 
o'clock when most of us had gone home to our 
luncheons. I, for one, never climbed its stairs to 
avail myself of its carefully guarded treasures; and 
I doubt if any one of my classmates was more dar- 
ing in adventuring himself within its austere walls, 
lined with glazed cases all cautiously locked. It 
contained less than fifteen thousand volumes; and 
it possessed no book which the grave and learned 
custodian had not personally examined to make 
sure that it was fit reading for youths of our tender 
years. This scrupulous librarian was allowed a 
sum of one thousand dollars a year for the increase 



108 THESE MANY YEARS 

of his collection; and he purchased only the very- 
few volumes which he felt to be absolutely neces- 
sary, taking great pride in returning to the treasury 
of the college as large an unexpended balance as 
might be possible. 

Professor Lounsbury once told me that during 
his student career at Yale, a little more than ten 
years earlier than mine at Columbia, he never heard 
mention of any English author. In the decade that 
divided us the world had moved at least a little; 
and we had one term in the history of English 
literature. But we were not introduced to the ac- 
tual writings of any of the authors, nor was any 
hint dropped that we might possibly be benefited 
by reading them for ourselves. We had to procure 
a certain manual of English literature, and to recite 
from its pages the names of writers, the titles of 
books, and the dates of publication — facts of little 
significance and of slight value unless we happened 
to be familiar with the several authors as a result 
of home influence, or of private taste. The manual 
prescribed for us was the compilation of a stolid 
text -book maker by the name of Shaw; and it illus- 
trated admirably the definition of history as "an 
arid region abounding in dates." 

In its freshman year, which I had skipped, my 
class had had a course in rhetoric, also studied in a 
formal text-book, providing detailed information as 
to the names which had been bestowed upon the 
several devices employed in the art of composition. 
But there was little or no instruction in the art it- 
self, in the actual practice of writing. The course 



UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 109 

in rhetoric was given by a tutor, whereas the course 
in English literature was given by a professor. This 
professor was a very learned Scotsman, Charles 
Murray Nairne; and the full title of his chair dis- 
closed the fact that to him was intrusted the in- 
struction in "Moral and Intellectual Philosophy and 
English Literature." Yet this title, ample as it 
may seem, did not indicate the complete range of 
his responsibilities, for to him was also committed 
the care of history, of political economy, and of 
logic. It was not only a chair that he filled, or even 
a settee; it was a series of settees, rising row on row; 
and there are now at Columbia probably nearly a 
hundred professors teaching the subjects which were 
then confided to the sole care of this one man. 

I think, altho I am not at all certain, that I must 
have had a course in philosophy, but if I did it left 
no trace, and it imparted no mental training. I do 
not suppose that the instruction was inferior at 
Columbia then to what it was in most of the other 
small colleges; in fact, I am inclined to believe that 
it was on the whole superior. Yet I have always 
regretted that I did not come under a teacher who 
might have imparted to me a realizing sense of the 
meaning and the value of philosophy, who might 
have opened my mind and taught me how to think. 
There was then a teacher of this type at Amherst, 
where my friend W. C. Brownell was my contem- 
porary; and in the Amherst men of Seelye's time I 
have always been able to perceive the mark of his 
stimulating influence. I remember that I had one 
term in logic and another in political economy; 



110 THESE MANY YEARS 

and altho the latter introduced me to sound doc- 
trine, the former left absolutely no impression. 
From our single term in English literature under 
Professor Nairne, I can resuscitate only one utter- 
ance of his — to the effect that the distinction be- 
tween poetry and prose might be made clear by re- 
membering that "exceeding beautiful" was prose, 
whereas "beautiful exceedingly" was poetry. 

It was in Latin and in Greek that I suffered the 
most from my deficient preparation, due partly to 
my foolish desire to enter as a sophomore, without 
having had the full work of freshman year and 
partly, indeed chiefly, to the fact that no one of my 
school-teachers at Anthon's or Churchill's or Char- 
lier's had made me understand the necessity of thoro- 
ness. I had insisted on being allowed to take my 
place in the ranks, when I ought to have been under- 
going the merciless drill of the awkward squad. 
Naturally enough my acquaintance with Latin was 
less fragmentary than with Greek. The professor 
of Latin was Charles Short, a man of many amusing 
peculiarities, but possessed of real learning and in- 
spired by a genuine love of letters. He opened my 
eyes to the charm of Horace, the chief Roman rep- 
resentative of what Cowper called "familiar verse"; 
and as he suggested that we cast into metrical form 
our assigned translations, I owe to him almost my 
earliest impulse to spy out the secrets of English 
versification. 

The professor of Greek was Henry Drisler, one of 
the most copious contributors to Liddell and Scott's 
dictionary. He was an erudite scholar with an abid- 



UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 111 

ing simplicity of manner in all his dealings with us. 
In his classroom, we stumbled thru the 'Agamem- 
non' of iEschylus, the '(Edipus Rex' of Sophocles, 
the 'Medea' of Euripides, and the 'Frogs' of Aris- 
tophanes. Brief as it was, no better selection could 
be made of the plays typical of the development 
of Greek drama, tragic and comic; and the reading 
of these masterpieces in the original might have 
been expected to awaken in me a keen interest in 
the Attic theater. I was already an assiduous play- 
goer, having also some slight acquaintance with the 
French stage; but a suggestion that we should pro- 
cure Donaldson's 'Theater of the Greeks' was not 
pushed any further, and I failed entirely to feel the 
theatrical effectiveness of any one of the four pieces. 
Either Professor Drisler did not himself visualize 
these once popular plays as having been originally 
devised by their several authors to be performed by 
actual actors in a real theater before sympathizing 
audiences, or else he did not believe that we were 
old enough or ripe enough in scholarship to take this 
point of view. Whatever the reason, the fact re- 
mains that in his classroom these plays were not 
revealed to us as drama, or even as poetry; they 
were only texts for translation, affording endless 
opportunities for a strictly grammatical inquisition 
into the darker interstices of our linguistic half- 
knowledge. Thus it is that my undergraduate study 
of Sophocles, for instance, did not reveal to me the 
loftiness of his soul, the vigor of his stern philos- 
ophy or his exquisitely skilful craftsmanship as a 
playwright; it left me rather with an annoying per- 



112 THESE MANY YEARS 

ception of his persistent perversity in employing the 
second aorist. 

Here again I feel bound to emphasize my belief 
that my class at Columbia was not more unfortunate 
in our study of the great dramatic poets of Greek 
than the immense majority of other classes in other 
colleges, not only in those remote days but even now. 
There are still only a few professors of Greek who 
endeavor to make their students realize and visualize 
the Greek theater, who illustrate their instruction 
by the aid of the graphic material now abundantly 
available, and who strive to relate it intimately to 
the Athenian life of that superb and astounding 
epoch. I remember that when Benjamin Ide 
Wheeler (now president of the University of Cali- 
fornia) was a professor at Cornell, I heard a fellow 
professor of Greek mention with unconcealed dis- 
approval, that "Ben Wheeler is teaching Greek 
with a magic lantern !" 

Ill 

In the summer of 1869, in the vacation that inter- 
vened between my sophomore and my junior years, 
my father allowed me to go on a trip to the West. 
I suppose that he thought it would be well for me to 
see something of my own country, after having seen 
more or less of Europe as a child and as a boy. 
One of my college friends, Edward Fermor Hall, 
accompanied me; and we were under the charge 
of a teacher from Charlier's, Mr. Brown. We went 
first to Chicago, where we took a steamer to the end 



UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 113 

of Lake Michigan, leaving it to shoot the rapids of 
Sault Ste. Marie while the boat was going thru the 
locks, and landing at Superior City opposite Duluth. 
Superior City had been laid out on a most magnifi- 
cent scale, befitting the future metropolis, which was 
to mark the end of navigation on the great lakes. 
When we arrived its boom had already burst, and 
it had only a hundred or two inhabitants. One of 
its projectors was John C. Breckenridge, with whom 
we had a brief interview. Duluth was less than 
half-a-dozen miles distant, and it had then exactly 
half-a-dozen houses. 

It was our intention to go up the St. Louis River 
into the Chippewa Reservation, and to make a carry 
over to one of the streams flowing into the Missis- 
sippi which would bear us down to Minneapolis. 
In Superior City we bought a birch canoe; we filled 
it with supplies for a fortnight; and we engaged two 
Indians to take us on our trip. The first night we 
camped at Fond du Lac on the banks of the St. 
Louis River within earshot of Duluth, where there 
had been landed only that day the earliest of the 
many boat-loads of men who were to be engaged in 
building the Northern Pacific Railroad. We had 
been told that these laborers were dissatisfied about 
something; that they had got at liquor; and that 
they might make trouble. At intervals during the 
night we heard shouts and occasional shots; and in 
the morning we were not sorry to be able to start 
on our voyage. 

There had been more rain than usual at that 
season — it was then July; and the river was out 



114 THESE MANY YEARS 

of its banks. The series of cascades known as the 
Dalles of the St. Louis were far wider than they or- 
dinarily were; and we poled slowly up the shallower 
sides of the stream. Soon we had to give this up 
and to make a seven-mile carry, sometimes with 
the water almost up to our waists. The rain was 
intermittent but abundant; and the trail was a 
neglected corduroy road, with only an occasional 
log in its proper place, the others having rotted away 
or sunk deep into the mud. We three whites were 
thoroly tired out by our unwonted miles over 
an unaccustomed road ; but the Indians seemed to 
feel no fatigue at all, altho they had to make the 
trip three times, once with the huge birch canoe, 
carried on their shoulders as they pushed past the 
dripping trees and thru the soaking underbrush, 
keeping up their steady jog-trot, and again as they 
went back to bring us the supplies which we had 
been unable to carry for ourselves. 

When at last in the twilight of the forest we made 
our camp on the bank of the St. Louis above the 
Dalles it was still raining, and I observed with keen 
appreciation the swiftness with which the Indians 
found dry wood, and made a fire, cut poles for our 
shelter-tents, and gathered springy evergreen twigs 
to make beds for us, so that we might be lifted a 
little above the sodden grass and moss. We were 
protected from the rain only by two or three rubber 
blankets laced together and thrown over poles that 
slanted forward to the fire; and we lay under this 
fragile shed with our feet almost in the ashes, and 
with our legs covered by other rubber blankets, 



UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 115 

while on the opposite side of the blazing logs the 
two Indians, each curled up into a ball like a squirrel, 
slept with their heads under their woollen blankets, 
which were ever absorbing more and more moisture. 

It was the first time I had ever lived out in the 
open; the first time I had ever camped out; the first 
time I had ever entered the forest primeval; the 
first time I had ever come into personal relations 
with the red man, whom I knew then not from 
Cooper and Parkman, but only from Edward S. 
Ellis's stories in the yellow-back Beadle's Dime 
Novels. The two Indians who were with us spoke 
no English, and their sparse French was habitant 
French rather than Parisian. But they were quick 
to understand our directions and our inquiries. We 
asked the Chippewa names for the necessary objects 
of travel; and in the course of the ten days that we 
were with them we managed to accumulate a vocab- 
ulary of several score native words. Mr. Brown suc- 
ceeded in compounding a Chippewa rendering of the 
old German drinking-song 'Edete, bibete, collegi- 
ales'; and this we used to sing, altho I doubt if its 
meaning was apprehended by the two stalwart and 
skilful redskins who were propelling us forward by 
the untiring strokes of their paddles. 

How stalwart and how skilful they were we had 
occasion to perceive the fourth day after we had 
started. We were going up a series of rapids which 
continued for perhaps half a mile, and which were 
not so severe as to force us to make a carry around 
them. The current was strong owing to the high 
water, and to avoid its full force we kept inshore. 



116 THESE MANY YEARS 

Of course it was far too strong to be overcome by 
paddling; and our Indians, one in the bow and the 
other in the stern, were poling us up. It was diffi- 
cult work, as the bottom was rocky, making it hard 
to place the poles so as to get a proper purchase. 
When we were within a hundred feet of the top of 
the last of the series of rapids, the pole in the hands 
of the Indian in the bow snapped short. Without a 
moment's hesitation, and before our birch could 
even begin to swing broadside to the current, he 
measured the length of the fragment in his hand 
with that which had been caught between the two 
rocks in the water. He instantly threw away the 
shorter piece, and thrusting his hand down into the 
current he gripped the longer half, and so held the 
canoe head on to the stream. For the second time 
in two years I had the Vision of Sudden Death. 
The Indian in the stern passed his pole to his fellow 
in the bow, who thrust it down and held it with 
one hand while with the other he pulled up his own 
broken end. When the Indian in the stern had 
possession of this abbreviated rod, the two of them 
cautiously contrived to get us to the nearest bank, 
where one of them jumped ashore and cut another 
pole. 

The Chippewa outbreak of 1862 had taken place 
only seven years before, when the fighting men of 
the State were otherwise engaged in Virginia; and 
there we were for more than a week alone in the 
Reservation, seeing the face of no white man in 
those ten days, except that of the blacksmith on 
Piatt Island, stationed there by the United States 



UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 117 

Government for the benefit of the Indians. Him 
we found on our fourth day, and with him we had 
a brief parley. He had two Indian squaws, but he 
was glad of a chance to pass the time of day with 
men of his own race. After we left him we came to 
a broader body of water, and we suddenly became 
conscious that our canoe was not the only one in the 
stream. Just behind us and rapidly approaching 
was another, silently propelled by the paddles of 
four Indians. They drew abreast of us, inter- 
changed a few sentences with the two Indians in 
our canoe, and then started forward and were soon 
lost to sight. Another day we paused for our mid- 
day meal at an Indian settlement of a dozen birch- 
bark-covered tepees — if they so be called, since they 
were not conical but cubical — standing about seven 
feet high and a dozen feet long. 

After seven days of paddling and poling up-stream 
we made a carry of two or three miles, launching 
the canoe in a creek which was not more than a 
yard wide, but which soon broadened out into a 
sizable stream. By this portage we had removed 
ourselves from water that flowed into the St. Law- 
rence to water that flowed into the Mississippi; and 
with the current in our favor, we were not long in 
entering the great river itself. We had hoped to 
reach Crow Wing — where we could take the rail- 
road to Minneapolis — before dark on our last day. 
But our Indians must have miscalculated the dis- 
tance, and it was long after midnight before we were 
able to get out of the canoe. It was a clear night 
above, but a fog hung low in the surface of the 



118 THESE MANY YEARS 

water, so that we did not think it wise to doze off. 
To keep ourselves awake we sang all the songs we 
knew, and we recited all the poetry we had ever 
learned. When these resources were exhausted, Hall 
began to repeat to us the bald text of the 'Black 
Crook,' a spectacle which he had seen nearly a hun- 
dred times, so that its turgid dialog had deposited it- 
self in his memory. 

The next morning we paid off our Indian compan- 
ions, giving them also the canoe and the residue of 
our supplies. We arrived at the hotel in St. Paul 
three sorry -looking tramps. Fortunately, our trunks 
were awaiting us, and we were able to resume the 
garb of civilization. Two days later we left St. 
Paul on the steamboat Northern Belle to go down 
the Mississippi. I recall that we ran into a hurri- 
cane that evening just as twilight was settling down, 
and while we were going thru a rocky defile; and 
when I came in after years to read Huck Finn's 
account of the storm on the Mississippi in which he 
was caught, I realized at once the veracity of Mark 
Twain's description. 

After a two days' voyage down the Mississippi we 
left the Northern Belle at Dubuque, and the next 
morning found us in Chicago, whence we returned 
to New York. 

It was not that summer but another and earlier 
summer when I was again in peril by water, and 
when for the third time in my life I had the Vision 
of Sudden Death. I was making the trip from the 
Thousand Isles to Montreal, and it was a season of 
heavy forest-fires. Once on our way to the Thou- 



UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 119 

sand Isles, our train had run thru blazing woods that 
threatened the track; and after leaving the Thou- 
sand Isles we had our horizon obscured by lowering 
banks of smoke. When we took on the aged Indian 
pilot who was to guide us thru the Lachine Rapids, 
the twilight was dim and murky. As a result of 
this failure of light, the pilot slightly swerved from 
his true course, and the boat crashed on a ledge 
of rocks when we had less than a hundred yards 
before we came to smooth water, and when we were 
in full view of the Montreal bridge. The bottom of 
the boat was so badly broken that it was impossible 
to back off and seek the channel again. So we re- 
mained there all night, trying to prevent the water 
from rising any higher in our shallow hold by stuffing 
mattresses into the breaks. In the early morning 
another boat came alongside and we were taken off 
and carried to Montreal, leaving our steamer stuck 
on the rocky ledge. I have been told that it was 
impossible to rescue her from this position, so that 
she had to be dismantled and her bones abandoned, 
to be picked by wind and wave, winter after winter. 

IV 

The rest of the summer of 1869 I spent with my 
parents at Newport. In the fall I returned to Co- 
lumbia for my junior year, which passed unevent- 
fully; and in the summer of 1870 we all went to 
Europe for three months. I had to remain behind 
for several weeks to take the examinations, going 
over by myself on the Scotia in time to spend the 



120 THESE MANY YEARS 

Fourth of July in London. Arriving early in June, 
my father and my mother saw the season at its 
height; and one of their experiences deserves men- 
tion. 

In the 'Recollections Grave and Gay' of Mrs. 
Burton Harrison, whose husband had been private 
secretary to Jefferson Davis, we are told that the 
winning of the battle of Bull Run was due to a 
warning sent to the Confederates by a lady living 
in Washington: 

McDowell has certainly been ordered to advance on 
the 16th. R. O. G. 

Mrs. G. (there is no need now to betray the 
name) was a lady of the highest social position in 
Washington; and at the outbreak of the war she 
was frequently able to transmit invaluable informa- 
tion to the Confederate authorities. In time she 
was discovered and sent thru the lines. She took a 
returning blockade-runner and went to London, 
where she was joined by a daughter, and where she 
was most warmly received in the best society of the 
British capital, then overwhelmingly Southern in its 
sympathies. She raised money for the Southern 
cause; she purchased quinine and other necessities; 
and she took passage back on another blockade- 
runner. Off the North Carolina coast the ship was 
chased by a United States vessel, and in trying to 
escape, it was run aground. The passengers and the 
crew took to the boats and tried to make a landing 
thru the surf. Mrs. G. fastened to her person the 



UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 121 

gold she was bringing in; and when her boat was 
upset in the breakers the weight of it kept her from 
rising, so that she was drowned. 

The daughter who had been with Mrs. G. in 
London was the wife of an officer in the United States 
army. When he was stationed at Fort Adams, his 
wife and my mother became intimate friends dur- 
ing the summers of 1868 and 1869. She gave my 
mother letters of introduction to some of the friends 
by whom her mother had been so cordially received 
half a dozen years earlier. And as a result of one 
of these letters my father and my mother went to 
dine one evening with Lord and Lady C. H. It was 
only a few weeks after the publication of Disraeli's 
novel of 'Lothair,' which had greatly amused my 
father as an almost photographic and phonographic 
revelation of the British aristocracy. When 'Lo- 
thair' chanced to come up in the course of his con- 
versation with his hostess, he asked if it was true 
that the novelist had drawn his fictitious characters 
from real persons, and so closely that they could be 
identified. 

"Indeed, he did," responded Lady C. H. "He 
makes no secret of it. And it is rather curious that 
you should have raised that question, since it hap- 
pens that nearly all of the originals of 'Lothair' are 
gathered here to-night." 

Then she called the roll of the leading figures in 
Disraeli's fiction, identifying each of them with one 
or another of the guests around the table. As my 
father said afterward, it gave him a strange sensa- 
tion; he said he did not know whether he was dining 






122 THESE MANY YEARS 

with the unreal characters of Disraeli's novel, or 
with the real characters of that other interesting 
work of fiction, Burke's 'Peerage.' 

I did not arrive in London until after the family 
had gone over to Paris, and there I joined them a 
day or two before war was declared with Prussia. 
My most striking recollection of those days of ner- 
vous tension was the impressive effect of the singing 
of the 'Marseillaise' by bands of excited men at 
all hours of the day and night. Thruout the eigh- 
teen years of the shabby and shoddy Second Empire, 
the fiery lyric of the Revolution had been under an 
interdict; and it was never heard in public. But 
now in the need to arouse the martial ardor of the 
people, the ban was taken off, and the spirit of the 
French at once expressed itself in the soul-stirring 
stanzas of the 'Marseillaise,' as I had heard the 
spirit of the Americans a decade earlier find voice 
in the sledge-hammer rhythm of 'John Brown's 
Body.' 

Shortly after the declaration of war we left Paris 
and made our way by devious routes to Schwalbach 
near Wiesbaden, where my mother took a cure. 
Then we went down to Switzerland. I recall that 
on our railroad journeys thru Germany our cars 
were held up more than once, and sometimes for 
several hours at a time, to permit the passage of 
trains bearing troops and supplies to the French 
frontier. Both at Schwalbach and at Wiesbaden 
we could not but notice the absence of almost every 
man between the ages of twenty and thirty. 

In August we were comfortably settled at Vevey 



UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 123 

for a stay of several weeks, until it became evident 
that the French were constantly getting the worst 
of the struggle, and that the Germans were steadily 
clearing their path toward Paris. If we meant to 
collect our belongings and to get across to Great 
Britain on our way home, we had better not delay. 
So we started suddenly for Paris, reaching there 
only a day or two before the battle of Sedan. We 
went to the Hotel Bristol on the corner of the Place 
Vendome and the Rue Castiglione, in front of Napo- 
leon's column. Paris was in a state of feverish un- 
rest; mounted military messengers were constantly 
galloping thru the Place Vendome; all sorts of dis- 
quieting rumors were in circulation; and even be- 
fore the actual news of the surrender at Sedan had 
become public, there was an oppressive atmosphere 
of impending disaster, very different from that of a 
few weeks earlier, when the mob was frantically 
shouting: "On to Berlin!" 

On that memorable Sunday, the 4th of Septem- 
ber, when the populace first learned the full extent 
of the defeat which had befallen the army, we found 
the streets sprinkled with groups of men talking far 
less loudly than on any preceding day. In the 
morning we went to the American Church, and as 
we came back down the Champs Elysees we felt as 
tho a sudden quiet "had fallen on the city. When 
we crossed the Place de la Concorde we could see 
on the other side of the river a surging mass of men 
surrounding the Corps Legislatif. At the top of the 
broad flight of steps leading up to the columned por- 
tico we could make out the figure of a single speaker 



124 THESE MANY YEARS 

in response to whose eloquence the crowd broke into 
shouts which came to us faintly across the bridge. 

In later years, when I first saw the statue of Gam- 
betta in the Place du Carrousel, representing him 
with uplifted arm in the act of proclaiming the re- 
public, I persuaded myself — or to put it more ac- 
curately, I did not doubt — that our swift passage 
across the Place de la Concorde at a little after twelve 
on September 4th had enabled us to behold the im- 
passioned orator at the very moment when he was 
declaring the downfall of the Empire. I felt quite 
as certain of this as that I had been a witness of the 
famous march of the Seventh Regiment in the first 
week of the Civil War. And I was as completely 
mistaken in the one case as in the other, since it 
was not until about four in the afternopn that Gam- 
betta made the speech to the people. 

Yet even if the formal pronouncement of the re- 
public was a little delayed, we discovered when 
our carriage drew up before the Hotel Bristol, that 
the Empire had no longer any friends willing to 
stand up to be counted. A group at the base of the 
Column Vendome was engaged in tearing down the 
wreaths of immortelles which had been hanging on 
its railings. I went out and tried to secure one as 
a memento of the historic day; but I was too late. 
When I returned to the hotel I found my father and 
my mother talking to the Comte de Saint-Albin, 
with whom they had made friends during their stay 
in Paris at the time of the Exposition, three years 
earlier. M. de Saint-Albin was the librarian of the 
Empress, and his sister was the wife of Achille 



UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 125 

Jubinal, who was a learned investigator of French 
medieval literature, and also a senator of the Empire. 
Mme. Jubinal had a large collection of fans, and her 
brother had come by appointment to take us to 
visit this collection. As a devoted imperialist he 
was disinclined to believe the bad news from the 
seat of war; and he saw no reason why we should 
not pay the promised visit to his sister. 

But when we were ushered into Mme. Jubinal's 
drawing-room, we found her walking to and fro 
and wringing her hands in the utmost distress. 
There had been an all-night session of the Senate; 
and it was now one in the afternoon, and she had 
had no news from her husband since the preceding 
morning. She did not know whether he was alive 
or dead. She feared that the Palace of the Senate 
might have been taken by assault and that the 
Parisian mob might have assassinated all the known 
supporters of the Empire. We withdrew immedi- 
ately, of course, leaving brother and sister together. 
When we got back to the hotel there were other sig- 
nificant evidences of the impending change. Men 
came out of the fashionable shops up and down the 
short Rue de Castiglione with blacking brushes in 
their hands to besmear the golden letters of the in- 
scription on their portals, asserting that they were 
patented purveyors to the Emperor, Fournisseurs 
brevetes de S. M. VEmpereur. Other men emerged 
on the balconies carrying hammers and crowbars, 
with which they wrenched off the metal coats of 
arms and the metal letters along the railings an- 
nouncing their connection with the imperial court. 



126 THESE MANY YEARS 

I was then only eighteen, and in my youthful 
Americanism I had brought with me an American 
flag. This I got out at once and hung to the rail- 
ings of our balcony at the corner. That evening 
Hall, the friend who had gone with me to the Chip- 
pewa Reservation the summer before, came for me, 
and we made a tour of the boulevards, rendered 
almost impassable by the crowd; and yet, dense as 
this mass was, it had to part now and again to give 
passage to a more compact phalanx of marchers who 
were chanting the 'Marseillaise,' or else singing a 
trivial lyric of a momentary popularity, with the 
refrain: "Si c'est de la canaille, eh Men, fen suis!" 
More than once we two youngsters were roughly 
accosted by a group of perfervid patriots, who 
sternly admonished us to shout for the republic. 
"Eh, vous autres I criez done 'Vive la Republique I " ' 

As I look back on that day of pent emotion sud- 
denly released, I cannot deny that the Parisians re- 
vealed themselves then in a state not unfairly to be 
described as hysteric. And yet when I recall the 
condition of the streets of London on the evening 
when the news came of the peace which brought the 
Boer War to an end, I am forced to confess that the 
Londoners seemed to me then quite as hysteric as 
the Parisians had appeared thirty years earlier. 
The Parisians were the more excusable of the two, 
yet there was not much choice between them and 
the Londoners: 

The Colonel's lady 
And Judy O'Grady 
Are sisters under their skins. 



UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 127 

When once we knew that the Emperor had sur- 
rendered his army and that there was nothing to 
oppose the advance of the Germans on Paris, we 
made swift preparation for departure. Actually we 
left Paris on one of the last trains permitted to get 
thru to Boulogne. And after a brief stay in London 
we took ship for New York. 



In our senior year at Columbia we felt the first 
stirrings of the movement which in the past fifty 
years has transformed the curriculum of every 
American college. For the first time we were al- 
lowed a few rigidly restricted options; we might 
make a choice between Greek and the calculus, for 
example, and between Latin and physics. As I had 
amused myself in Paris as a boy with elementary 
electrical experiments, having possessed myself of 
a toy Ruhmkorf coil and a few diminutive Giesler 
tubes, I chose physics; and I was rewarded by the 
pleasure and the profit of hearing Professor Ogden 
N. Rood lecture on the modulatory theory, and of 
seeing him perform illustrative experiments. In 
those remote days all instruction was didactic, and 
no one had ever ventured to suggest that students 
should themselves weigh and measure in a laboratory 
to verify their own observations. Even in chem- 
istry we were never permitted to touch a test-tube 
or a reagent with our own hands, all illustrations 
being in the sole charge of the professor of chemistry, 
Charles A. Joy. He was reported to have absorbed 



128 THESE MANY YEARS 

all the latent and latest science of Germany, but if 
he had, he did not take us tyros seriously, and his 
attempts to prove his assertions were always a little 
hit-or-miss in their results. We respected Professor 
Rood as a true man of science, who had conducted 
original investigations and made contributions of 
his own, whereas we held Professor Joy in tolerant 
contempt, laughing at his most successful experi- 
ment, which we used to call the Ignition of Friction- 
matches on Scientific Principles. 

While I still suffered under the handicap of inade- 
quate preparation in the classics, I was not behind 
my classmates in the new scientific subjects which 
they and I approached together for the first time. 
Yet I was pleasantly surprised to discover that in 
the final ranking of the senior class for our first 
year, I stood in almost exactly the middle, being 
fifteenth out of thirty-one. Stuyvesant Fish was 
third, and Oscar Straus was seventh; I do not 
now recall the standing of two other members of the 
class, Robert Fulton Cutting and Henry Van Rens- 
selaer (who turned Roman Catholic a few years 
later, becoming first a Paulist Father, and finally a 
Jesuit). How I attained even to my modest posi- 
tion in the middle of the class I do not now know, 
since I was not more diligent in study than I had 
been in my earlier years. Other things interested 
me more than the stated duties of the classroom. I 
was beginning to read widely and more intelligently, 
and in this I was aided by a list of books which my 
father had asked Professor Drisler to draw up for my 
benefit. There were a dozen or a score volumes, and 



UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 129 

my father gave them to me at once. Fortunately, 
they were of various kinds, and some of them, 
Whitney's 'Life and Growth of Language' and Bur- 
ton's 'Book-Hunter,' were not appreciated until sev- 
eral years later. But two of the books that I owe 
to Professor Drisler's kindness had an abiding influ- 
ence. One of these was Matthew Arnold's 'Essays 
in Criticism,' and the other was Lowell's 'Among 
My Books,' which had only recently appeared, and 
which led me eagerly to acquire Lowell's later essays 
as rapidly as they were published. To Arnold and 
to Lowell I owe my initiation into the principles and 
the practice of criticism — an initiation aided also 
by a fifth volume on the list, Schlegel's 'Lectures on 
Dramatic Literature,' which helped to foster a more 
intelligent interest in the theater. 

Not only was I reading more widely and more 
wisely, I was also writing assiduously, giving myself 
the practice in composition which had been denied 
me in college. During the week or ten days that I 
had spent in London after the proclamation of the 
French Republic I had become interested in a daily 
called the Figaro, supposed to be subsidized if not 
supported by Napoleon. It was edited by James 
Mortimer, also known as an adapter of French 
plays. Him I went to see, and he invited me to 
send him weekly or semiweekly letters on my return 
to New York. He even promised to pay for them* 
— whenever the Figaro should be in a condition to 
indulge in such a luxury, a moment which never ar- 
rived. Over these letters I toiled for hours, criti- 
cizing with juvenile self-assurance the new plays and 



130 THESE MANY YEARS 

the new books which appeared during the following 
winter. I do not now understand why any editor 
should have printed these boyish effusions; to his 
London readers they could have had but little inter- 
est; but to me their value was inestimable, for in 
composing them as a labor of love I taught myself 
the trade of writing — or at least I made a beginning 
toward the acquisition of the difficult craft of com- 
position. I may note here that only a few months 
after I became its New York correspondent the 
London Figaro shrank from a daily into a weekly, 
devoting itself largely to theatrical affairs, and hav- 
ing for its successive dramatic critics Clement Scott 
and William Archer. 

Nor did I confine myself to prose. I had already 
adventured myself in verse in a few translations 
from Horace and from Heine. In London in that 
same summer I had fallen in with Frederick Locker- 
Lampson's unerring selection of familiar verse, 
'Lyra Elegantiarum,' and this had led me to pro- 
cure his own 'London Lyrics.' By the latter and 
by Praed's brilliant poems in the former, I had been 
moved to imitation. I also rimed a few parodies, 
and I contributed a few artificial lyrics to the mori- 
bund monthly of the Columbia undergraduates, 
which was pretentiously entitled Cap and Gown. 
When Oscar Straus ran for governor of New York 
in 1912, more than one of the biographical sketches 
of him which appeared in the newspapers asserted 
that he and I had been rivals for the post of class- 
poet. This was inaccurate, as his poem on 'Our 
Era' had been delivered at an exhibition in the 



UNDERGRADUATE DAYS 131 

Academy of Music, known as the Students' Semi- 
Annual; and it was on our class-day in the early 
summer of 1871, I found myself set down on the 
program as designated to deliver the class-poem. 

I have recently disinterred it and read it again 
after many years — with a strange resuscitation of 
my lost youth. Poem it was not, despite the affirma- 
tion on the program; the best that can be said for 
it is that it was a serried column of local allusions, 
tagged out with more or less ingenious rimes. And 
yet, poverty-stricken as it was, it served its pur- 
pose then; and its composition, like the concocting 
of my other experiments in verse, served another 
purpose — it helped me to a firmer command over 
the vocabulary, and made it easier for me to say 
what I had to say when I returned to my more 
natural mode of expression, plain prose. In the two- 
score and more years since I graduated from college 
I have only infrequently dropped into rime; and I 
have never published a volume of verse — altho my 
sexagenarian vanity did tempt me to collect a few 
of my scattered verses into a privately printed 
pamphlet, * Fugitives from Justice,' presented to less 
than a hundred of my friends on my sixtieth birth- 
day. 

Yet I am bound to set down here the fact that 
when Columbia celebrated in 1886 the centenary of 
its reopening after the Revolutionary War, to which 
King's College had contributed Hamilton and Liv- 
ingston, Jay and Gouverneur Morris, I received a 
letter from President Barnard, asking me to prepare 
a poem for the occasion. I appreciated the com- 



132 THESE MANY YEARS 

pliment of the invitation; but I had learned a little 
wisdom in the fifteen years since I had rashly stood 
up in the twilight of class-day to read my straggling 
rimes, and so I smilingly put the temptation by and 
regretfully declined the proffered place of honor. 



CHAPTER VII 
ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE LAW 



WHEN I graduated from college I was only 
nineteen; my father did not need me in 
his office; and he did want me to fit my- 
self as fully as possible for the management of the 
property he expected me to control. There was 
then no graduate school in any American university; 
and therefore, if I was to continue my studies, there 
was practically no opportunity open to me other 
than that offered by a law school. I felt no attrac- 
tion to the bar, and my father had not planned a 
legal career for me; yet it was plain to us both that 
an acquaintance with the law could not fail to be 
useful to a young man who was to inherit a fortune, 
and who was expected to go into politics, then as 
now more or less monopolized by lawyers. Ac- 
cordingly, in the fall of 1871 I entered the Colum- 
bia Law School, which was then housed in a dingy 
dwelling in the Colonnade Row of Lafayette Place, 
almost opposite the Astor Library. 

When in our old age we are tempted to look back 
longingly at the conditions of our youth, and to 
deplore occasional lapses from former standards, 
we ought not to shut our eyes to the obvious evi- 
dence of progress; this evidence is nowhere more 

133 



134 THESE MANY YEARS 

obvious than in the organization of our higher edu- 
cation. In the remote days when I began to study 
law, no one of the professional schools, whether of 
law or medicine or theology, had yet stiffened its 
entrance requirements to exclude applicants who 
had not received at least the beginnings of a liberal 
education. Indeed, I doubt if any of the law schools 
or medical schools hesitated then to admit students 
who had not completed a full high school course. 
This low standard of admission, and a correspond- 
ingly low standard for graduation may be ascribed 
most probably to two facts: first, that these pro- 
fessional schools were often only nominally attached 
to the colleges whose names they had borrowed, 
and second, that they were in many cases wholly 
or in part proprietary — that is, they were run for 
the profit of the professors. It was at the very end 
of the nineteenth century that the College of Physi- 
cians and Surgeons ceased to be a money-making 
trade-school absolutely owned by its faculty, and 
became an integral part of Columbia, and thereafter 
responsive to the loftier ideals of a true university 
spirit. 

The Columbia Law School when I entered it was 
a semiproprietary institution, being the result of a 
partnership between the college, which lent its name, 
and the warden, Theodore W. Dwight, who gave 
his wide reputation, his unflagging energy, and his 
marvellous power of exposition. This partnership 
was profitable to the college since there were many 
students and only one instructor. It is true that in 
my second year I was permitted to listen to an in- 



ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE LAW 135 

teresting course of lectures on medical jurisprudence 
given by Dr. John Ordronnaux. But all other in- 
struction was imparted by Professor Dwight him- 
self, toiling unceasingly. The course was then lim- 
ited to two years; and except for a few weeks we 
met no other teacher than the warden. Nor does 
this bare statement measure the full extent of his 
self-imposed burden. The two classes, junior and 
senior, were divided each into two sections, one 
meeting in the morning and the other in the after- 
noon — the second being intended for the benefit 
of the students who were giving their forenoons to 
practical service in law offices. This imposed upon 
Professor Dwight the fatiguing task of meeting be- 
fore one o'clock the two morning sections, one of 
the juniors and one of the seniors, each in turn, 
and then of facing after four the afternoon sections 
of these two separate classes. He thus took upon 
himself at least twenty hours of classroom instruc- 
tion, besides carrying on most efficiently the varied 
duties of administration. 

Under these conditions it is plain that the law 
school did not then proffer instruction in jurispru- 
dence intended to make its graduates masters of 
the whole science of law, but that it was not un- 
fairly to be termed rather a trade-school for lawyers, 
designed simply to fit them to earn a living as prac- 
titioners in the courts of New York. 

Professor Dwight was commonly called a great 
teacher. His greatness could be denied by nobody 
who had once sat at his feet. But, to my mind, at 
least, a teacher is precisely what he was not — if the 



136 THESE MANY YEARS 

art of teaching requires that the instructor shall 
guide the student to work independently, to discover 
principles for himself, and in time to acquire the 
power of applying these principles to the manifold 
situations which may confront him. It is not un- 
fair to say that Professor Dwight did not force us 
to do our own thinking. What he did was to do 
our thinking for us; to declare to us the principles; 
and to apply them himself to selected situations. 
His greatness lay in the marvellous sharpness with 
which he seized the essential principles of the law 
and in the masterly manner in which he elucidated 
them before us. His appeal was therefore mainly 
to our memories. For his gift of clarity no words 
of praise can be too high. Certainly I have never 
listened to any one whose skill in exposition even 
approached his. He was so clear, he made every 
successive point so acutely, that it was impossible 
not to follow him step by step, and to absorb day 
after day the fundamentals of the law. After more 
than twoscore years I find that I can recapture 
to-day not a few of the distinctions that he declared 
to us. But no student can put forth his whole 
strength when he is fed exclusively on predigested 
food. 

There were text-books, including Blackstone's 
* Commentaries,' of course, for a few pages in which 
we were made daily responsible, and from which we 
were called upon to recite. But the larger part of our 
instruction was derived from Professor Dwight's own 
lectures, upon which we took copious notes. In our 
second year there were moot-courts for the trial of 



ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE LAW 137 

imaginary cases, members of the senior class being 
assigned as counsel on the one side or the other, 
and being expected to prepare the cases for trial 
before the warden. The examinations at the end 
of each of the two years were oral, each of us being 
called up in turn and questioned by Professor Dwight 
sitting alone. And when I consider the immense re- 
sponsibility he had accepted, I marvel the more at 
his unfailing courtesy, at his constant kindliness, 
and at the ever-present serenity of his demeanor. 

n 

As I seek to interpret the dim memories of my 
youth, it seems to me that during my three years 
in college and my two years in the law school, I 
was overcoming the unpopularity which I recognize 
was mine in my early boyhood, and which lingered 
all thru my later school-days. I had to pay the 
severe penalty of being the only son of indulgent 
parents; and there was indisputable significance in 
the nickname of the "Benecia Boy" bestowed on 
me at Anthon's before I was ten; it testified to a 
displeasing pugnacity which wore away slowly at 
Churchill's and at Charlier's, as my undue self- 
assertion and my forthputting aggressiveness dimin- 
ished under the attrition of association with others 
of my own years, who made me respect their equal 
rights to their own opinions. 

In college I did not wait long for election to the 
Greek letter society in which most of my school 
friends were already members. And in the law 



138 THESE MANY YEARS 

school I was one of a dozen or more who met fort- 
nightly at each other's houses to discuss a simple 
supper, and also various topics more often literary 
than legal, altho we chose to call our society the 
Judge and Jury. I recall that at one of our gather- 
ings George L. Rives climbed up into the family 
tree of the Warringtons, and traced for us the des- 
cent of the affiliated characters who appear genera- 
tion after generation in the successive novels of 
Thackeray. Among the other members of the J. 
and J. were Hamilton Fish, who had been my room- 
mate during my first year at Churchill's, and John 
Scott Laughton, who was to be my most intimate 
friend for several years thereafter, and in fact until 
he removed to Washington to take a place under the 
Alabama Claims Commission, kindly procured for 
him by Fish. 

In the fall of 1871 came the exposure and the ex- 
pulsion of the Tweed Ring; and to do our share 
before the decisive election, we organized in the law 
school a Young Men's Reform Association, which 
undertook the task of aiding Tilden in preventing 
plural voting. The present admirable registration 
law of New York had not then been passed, and to 
exclude repeaters from the polls it was necessary to 
prepare, in advance and by a house-to-house can- 
vass, a list of those actually entitled to vote. Most 
of this work was turned over to paid experts; but 
some of it was done by the members of the Young 
Men's Reform Association. To me was assigned the 
block bounded by Broadway, Sixth Avenue, 25th 
and 26th Streets. I went to every house and se- 



ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE LAW 139 

cured the names o£ all the males of voting age; and 
two of my experiences may be worthy of record. 

At one residence my ring was answered by a very 
alert Irish girl, who was plainly puzzled by my un- 
usual errand. I asked for the gentleman of the 
house. He was not at home. By this time, as a 
result of my earlier practice, I had managed to get 
well inside the main hall. I asked for the lady of 
the house, if she was at home. She was at home — 
but what did I want? I bade the servant tell her 
mistress that a gentleman wanted to speak to her. 
After more than a little demur the girl started up- 
stairs, but when she was half-way up she turned and 
looked at me suspiciously. Then she came down 
to the hat-rack near where I was standing in the hall 
and took possession of an overcoat which she car- 
ried with her as she went up again, after another 
dubious inspection of the waiting visitor. 

At another ample brownstone house the door 
was opened by an affable colored man. The gentle- 
man of the house was not in. Then, as usual, I in- 
quired for the lady of the house. The attendant 
answered with a little surprise at my ignorance 
that there was not any lady of the house. And then 
from the front parlor a tall man with a characteristic 
black mustache appeared to inquire my errand. 
When I had explained, he said that Mr. Ransom 
was not in, and that nobody slept in the house but 
three of the negro boys. Then I knew where I was 
— in one of the most famous of the fashionable 
gambling-houses, flourishing unmolested under the 
"wide-open" privileges granted by the Tammany 



140 THESE MANY YEARS 

authorities. None the less did the black-mustached 
dealer summon the negro boys and tell them to give 
me their names. 

During the summer of 1872, between my junior 
and senior years at the law school, I left the house 
which my father had taken at Tarrytown (not far 
from Sunnyside, where Washington Irving's nieces 
were still living) for a week's trip to the Thousand 
Isles under conditions pleasantly exciting to a boy 
who had lived thru the martial fervor of the Civil 
War. One of the largest and most beautiful of the 
Thousand Isles had been chosen for his summer 
home by George M. Pullman; and there in his spa- 
cious house he indulged in a liberal hospitality. 
My father's brother was a relative by marriage of 
Mrs. Pullman's, and in August he was invited to be 
a guest at Pullman's Island during the week when 
it was to be made memorable by a visit from Gen- 
eral Grant, then newly nominated for his second 
term as President of the United States. On this 
occasion General Grant was to be accompanied by 
two other chiefs of the Union forces, General Sher- 
man and General Sheridan. At the suggestion of 
my uncle, Mr. Pullman graciously included me in 
his invitation. 

I wish that I could here set down a richer record 
of those three men of action, alike in their simplicity 
of manner and in their easiness of approach. I had 
a few words with each of them, but what they said, 
if they said anything, has faded from my recollection. 
What does float at the top of my memory is only a 
rather confused impression of my own reverent 



ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE LAW 141 

awe as I stared at them intently whenever occasion 
offered — and also my juvenile interest in the loco- 
motive headlights which had been borrowed to il- 
luminate the tiny stage set up in a little clearing 
levelled amid the trees and the rocks — a clearing 
which served also as a dancing floor on the occasion 
of the ball given one night during my stay in honor 
of the President, and attended by the cottagers from 
all the islands for miles up and down the St. 
Lawrence. 

Ill 

During the two years when I was supposed to be 
absorbing the law, I was increasingly devoted to 
the drama in all its theatrical manifestations. I 
went to the first nights of new plays and to the open- 
ing of new theaters. As an undergraduate I had 
been enabled (thru the kindness of James Renwick, 
one of the architects of the theater) to be present 
at the opening of Booth's; this was in 1869 — and 
exactly forty years thereafter I was invited to the 
opening of the New Theater, an enterprise even 
more ambitious than Edwin Booth's, and not more 
successful. I had also attended the first perform- 
ance and the last performance of the theater man- 
aged by John Brougham, a little playhouse behind 
the Fifth Avenue Hotel, afterward entitled the Fifth 
Avenue Theater, and later rebuilt by Steele Mac- 
kaye as the Madison Square. As the Fifth Avenue 
it was managed by Augustin Daly until it was de- 
stroyed by fire; and there I saw a long sequence of 
interesting performances. 



142 THESE MANY YEARS 

Daly not only loved the theater ardently, he 
lived for it alone; he had inexhaustible energy and 
immense ambition. He challenged at once the 
hitherto acknowledged leadership of the theater 
established ten years earlier by J. W. Wallack, and 
then more laxly controlled by Lester Wallack. 
Daly gathered a strong and varied company, en- 
listing a star like E. L. Davenport, and engaging 
refugees from Wallack's, including George Holland. 
He came in time to make a specialty of his own 
adaptations from contemporary Parisian plays, be- 
ginning with the 'Froufrou' of Meilhac and Halevy, 
made memorable to me by the appealing charm of 
Agnes Ethel. It was in one or another of the pieces 
which Daly liked to proclaim as the "Reigning 
Parisian Sensation" that Clara Morris displayed her 
uneven but indisputable power. But Daly was 
anxious to develop American dramatists also, and 
here he stood in most complete opposition to Lester 
Wallack (a native of New York, as it happened by 
chance), who in spite of all temptations to belong 
to other nations remained an Englishman, and who 
preferred a bald British adaptation of a feeble French 
piece to any play of American authorship. It was 
Daly who gave Bronson Howard his opportunity; 
and it was at Daly's that I attended the first night 
of 'Saratoga,' a highly artificial but ingeniously 
amusing farce, which Daly advertised as "a Comedy 
of Contemporaneous American Character" — this 
being precisely what it was not. 

Daly was very catholic in his taste, eager to put 
on any play which pleased him, old or new, Ameri- 



ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE LAW 143 

can or British or French. He revived the 'Good 
Natured Man,' for example, altho he could not have 
expected it to please nineteenth-century audiences 
in New York any better than it had originally 
pleased eighteenth-century audiences in London. 
When I came to know him in later years, I asked 
why he had taken down Goldsmith's unsuccessful 
comedy from the dusty shelf where it had reposed 
ever since Halleck and Drake had collaborated in 
riming the Croaker poems. "Oh, I did it because 
my brother, the judge, said he would like to see it 
acted," was Daly's answer. "Of course, I knew 
there was no money in it." This reply was per- 
fectly characteristic; Daly wanted to make money 
naturally enough, for otherwise he could not have 
continued to give himself the pleasure of bringing 
out the plays which took his fancy. His likings 
were manifold, including tragedy as well a^s comedy, 
operetta as well as farce and melodrama. 

It was at Daly's that I beheld the chirpy veteran, 
Charles J. Mathews, in many of his favorite pieces, 
especially in 'Cool as a Cucumber,' and in Planche's 
amusing burlesque entitled the 'Golden Fleece,' in 
which the brisk and voluble comedian appeared 
as the extraneous Chorus. It was at Daly's that I 
was first introduced to certain of Shakspere's com- 
edies, altho I had ear her seen the 'Midsummer 
Night's Dream' at the Olympic, with G. L. Fox as 
Bottom. When Mrs. Scott-Siddons appeared in 
America, Daly engaged her to appear as Rosalind 
and as Viola, supporting her fragile personality and 
her attenuated talent by the full strength of his 



144 THESE MANY YEARS 

company. In fact my own memory of Mrs. Scott- 
Siddons as Viola is now pale and faint, while I can 
still recall the highly colored fun of Fanny Daven- 
port as the rollicking Maria. "The full strength of 
the company" is no empty phrase when applied to 
the actors Daly had collected under his management, 
as can be evidenced by the fact that I once saw the 
'School for Scandal' performed at the Fifth Avenue 
on an evening when the unemployed members of 
the organization were giving 'London Assurance' 
in Newark. Each of these plays calls for a large 
and competent cast; yet I must confess that the 
effect of Sheridan's masterpiece was somewhat weak- 
ened by the absence of two or three of those who 
were appearing elsewhere in Boucicault's falsely 
glittering fabrication. 

Altho Shakspere was only infrequently presented 
at Wallack's Theater, it was there that I first saw 
'Much Ado About Nothing,' with Rose Eytinge as 
Beatrice and with Benedick, undertaken by Lester 
Wallack himself, adorned with the sweeping sable 
mustache which he never sacrificed even when ap- 
pearing as Captain Absolute. And at Booth's I 
made acquaintance with 'Henry VIII,' revived so 
that Charlotte Cushman could repeat her most 
touching portrayal of Queen Katherine; and I can 
even now after more than twoscore years thrill 
again to the exquisite pathos of her "Be husband to 
me, heaven !" And while I was a law student I was 
present at the opening night of the Union Square 
Theater under the management of A. M. Palmer, 
when Agnes Ethel appeared as Agnes, the lovely 



ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE LAW 145 

heroine of a machine-made piece which Sardou had 
adroitly composed especially for her, and which he 
subsequently revised for performance in Paris under 
the name of 'Andrea.' As acted at the Union Square 
it was a slight and sketchy play, owing all its attrac- 
tion to the charming personality of Agnes Ethel 
herself — at least, this is a fair inference from the 
fact that the play never had any success except 
when she appeared in it. In her version the last 
act of the comedy-drama owed much of its effective- 
ness to the theatrical ingenuity of Charles Fechter, 
who suggested significant departures from Sardou's 
manuscript. 

Several years earlier my father had been one of 
the shareholders in a theater which Fechter was 
afterward to manage, and which he was to call the 
Lyceum. It was later known as the Fourteenth 
Street Theater; and it was originally called the 
French Theater, being intended for a French com- 
pany which should present a changing repertory of 
current and standard plays. When this experiment 
failed from lack of support, the house did not dis- 
avow its name; as it was taken over by "Colonel" 
Bateman, the husband of the authoress of an early 
American comedy, 'Self,' and the father of the 
Bateman Sisters, the elder of whom, Kate, had been 
triumphantly successful 'as Leah in Daly's adapta- 
tion of Mosenthal's 'Deborah.' Bateman imported 
a skilfully recruited opera-bouffe troupe, which in- 
troduced to our public the 'Grande Duchesse de 
Gerolstein,' the 'Belle Helene,' and several other of 
the satirically humorous fantasies that Meilhac 



146 THESE MANY YEARS 

and Halevy had written to be set to lilting music by 
Offenbach. The prima donna was at first Tostee, 
who seemed to me in the 'Grande Duchesse' to be 
worthy of comparison with Schneider, whom I had 
seen in the part in Paris during the exposition of 
1867. Tostee was followed by Paola-Marie and 
Irma, and later by Marie Aimee, perhaps the most 
accomplished of the three, with a brilliancy of fun, 
and also with an unexpected power of pathos dis- 
played discreetly in Perichole's letter song, "Adieu, 
mon cher amant." 

When Bateman took the Lyceum in London to 
exploit his daughter Kate, and unexpectedly to dis- 
close the intensity of Henry Irving by producing 
the 'Bells,' the fascinating field of opera-bouffe was 
left to the elder Grau (whose nephew, Maurice, 
afterward the manager of the Metropolitan Opera 
House, was my classmate in the Columbia Law 
School). His company was headed by Desclauzas, 
and its most profitable appearances were in 'Gene- 
vieve de Brabant,' with its immensely and absurdly 
popular duet for two gens d'armes. How it was that 
I was able to penetrate into the sacred precincts I 
cannot now explain; but I do remember that I was 
permitted to be present more than once at the 
rehearsals. 

IV 

As it happened, I had an even more intimate, 
altho unsuspected, relation to the Grau enterprise, 
because I translated the libretto of 'Chilperic,' to 
be vended in the lobbies as the book of the opera. 



ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE LAW 147 

This early appearance between the covers of a 
pamphlet was strictly anonymous, and I cannot fix 
the year of it, as my copy of the libretto, possibly 
the sole survivor, has not even a dated copyright 
notice. It must have been when I was about seven- 
teen or eighteen. 

In this specimen of unremunerated hackwork I 
had for a collaborator my schoolfellow, Francis S. 
Saltus, who was responsible for rendering the French 
lyrics into English rimes, and who left to me only 
the humbler task of turning Herve's violently ec- 
centric dialog into humdrum English. Probably it 
was Saltus, intensely enamored of all the lighter 
forms of music, and already resolved to write a life 
of Donizetti (never to be written by him), who had 
originally undertaken this translation of 'Chilperic,' 
and who had enlisted me to help him out with the 
pedestrian prose, always less tempting to his feath- 
ered pen. 

Quite possibly it was this anonymous translation 
which encouraged me to attempt an adaptation not 
for sale at the doors of a theater, but destined for 
its stage. I took a protean farce, the 'Conferences 
chez Beaubichon,' and I Americanized it as best I 
could. It had been contrived to display the ver- 
satility of a comic actor of the Varietes, and it per- 
mitted him to assume four contrasting characters 
in the course of a single act. When I had done the 
deed, and when I had got it back from the theatrical 
copyist, with all its stage business duly underscored 
in red ink, I sent it to Stuart Robson. This was a 
most infelicitous choice, since Robson was probably 



148 THESE MANY YEARS 

the least varied actor it has ever been my fate to 
behold, owing such reputation as he had to the 
quaintness of his personality, unchangeable and un- 
concealable whatever the character might be. 

Yet absurd as was my choice of a performer for 
the privilege of producing my borrowed playlet, it 
was not altogether a mistake, since the quadruple 
make-up to be assumed by the impersonator of the 
comic hero had an irresistible appeal for the actor 
who could never be other than himself; and a long 
blue playbill, preciously preserved thru all these 
many years and lying before me as I write, reminds 
me that at the Academy of Music in Indianapolis 
on Friday, October 13, 1871, for the relief of the 
sufferers by the Chicago fire, Stuart Robson appeared 
in four one-act plays, the third being "a dramatic 
eccentricity entitled ' Very Odd ' for the first time, in 
any city." Honesty compels me to record that it 
was then performed — on Friday, the 13th — for the 
last time in any city. 

A year or two later I adapted another French 
piece in one act, the 'Serment d'Horace' of Henry 
Mtirger. While I retained the ingenious construc- 
tion of the brisk and bustling original, I dealt 
freely with the dialog, and I localized the plot, ar- 
bitrarily transferring the action from Paris to New 
York, as was the fashion in those distant days when 
the drama of the English language drew its suste- 
nance from the French. I do not believe that * Frank 
Wylde' was ever seen on the professional stage, but 
as I published it in a magazine, and later in a collec- 
tion of 'Comedies for Amateur Acting,' it was 



ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE LAW 149 

speedily taken up by amateurs, who performed it 
again and again. It was long a favorite with the 
Comedy Club of New York, and Frank Wylde 
was repeatedly impersonated by Evert Jansen 
Wendell. 

These two adaptations were the natural result, 
first of my intense ambition to become a playwright, 
and second of my incessant study of the contem- 
porary French drama. I read all the important 
plays produced in Paris as fast as they were pub- 
lished; and I pushed back my researches to the 
masterpieces of the romanticist movement of 1830. 
In fact, I read widely in the whole range of the in- 
comparable dramatic literature of France, neglect- 
ing at that time the manifold manifestations of 
English imaginative energy in the Elizabethan 
period. From the French drama I was led to the 
Spanish, which I approached in French translations, 
as my own Spanish was but a younger brother's por- 
tion. I was taken captive by the inventive ingenu- 
ity of Lope de Vega and of Calderon. To this study 
I was stimulated by the appetizing little book on the 
Spanish drama which George Henry Lewes had 
made up out of his contributions to various quarter- 
lies. Thus I was led to the more solid and stately 
tomes of Ticknor's monumental history of Spanish 
literature. Under the guidance of Schlegel I made 
incursions into the drama of other tongues; and in 
an old diary I find a prophetic entry made in Feb- 
ruary, 1873, just before I was twenty-one, solemnly 
recording my ambition to compose a 'History of 
Dramatic Literature ' — a youthful project accom- 



150 THESE MANY YEARS 

plished thirty years later, since it was in October, 
1903, that I published a book on the 'Development 
of the Drama.' 



And all this time I was supposed to be studying 
law. I was attending the lectures regularly, and I 
was reading more or less assiduously the assigned 
pages of Blackstone. But studying was exactly 
what I was not doing; in fact, I did not then know 
what real study meant. I was still taking things 
easily, scraping thru the examinations partly by 
strenuous cramming at the last moment, and partly 
by sheer good luck. To me law was not a bread- 
and-butter profession on the mastery of which my 
future depended; it was only an elegant accomplish- 
ment, likely to be more or less useful to me when I 
should find myself in possession of a fortune. I had 
no vital interest in law, in fact I doubt if I had a 
vital interest in anything. For "society," as it is 
called, I had no relish, altho I "went out" more or 
less. I was glad always when I met a man of letters; 
and I recall that there came to my father's house at 
one time or another John Hay and Richard Grant 
White, and John R. Thompson (who had been 
Poe's successor as editor of the Southern Literary 
Messenger) . 

My chief interest was in books, and more especially 
in play -books. I browsed in my father's library; 
and I can recall the taking down of every succes- 
sive volume of an interminable series of the British 



ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE LAW 151 

Essayists, all the pages of which I turned with 
little or no profit, except in so far as I might have 
unconsciously absorbed lessons in style. I had 
ceased to write letters to the London Figaro; and I 
had begun to compose articles which I would send 
in turn to every one of the few American magazines 
then existing: the Atlantic, the Galaxy, Harper's, 
Lippincott's, and Putnam's. In Harper's we were all 
reading 'Middlemarch,' as George Eliot's leisurely 
analysis of English provincial life appeared month 
by month for two solid years. Putnam's was soon 
swallowed up by the new Scribner's Monthly. The 
Galaxy (which later sank below the horizon into the 
Atlantic) was then the magazine most attractive to 
me, with Colonel J. W. De Forest's 'Overland' for 
its serial, with the earlier short stories of Henry 
James, and with its frequent essays by Richard 
Grant White and Junius Henri Browne. 

In spite of my devotion to the drama, my earliest 
literary efforts were not on theatrical themes. My 
browsing among books had awakened an interest in 
what I suppose must be called the Curiosities of 
Literature, since that is the title consecrated by the 
elder Disraeli. I rambled thru the realm of parody; 
I uttered 'Cursory Notes on Swearing,' and I made 
my first critical investigations in the field of familiar 
verse. I adventured myself into humorous poetry, 
imitating as best I could the punning stanzas of 
Hood, and the coruscating society verse of Praed. I 
had succeeded early in getting a few bits of comic 
copy accepted by a short-lived weekly entitled 
Punchinello, edited by Charles Dawson Shanly. It 



152 THESE MANY YEARS 

was one of the many infelicitous attempts to mimic 
Punch or the London Charivari — itself, as its full 
title shows, originally an imitation of a Parisian 
paper. I believe that Shanly had been connected 
with two earlier efforts to transplant to America the 
form of Punch — humorous weeklies soon swept 
beneath the waters of oblivion. One of these was 
called Mrs, Grundy, and the other Vanity Fair. I 
discovered later that Punchinello owed its brief ex- 
istence of a scant half-year to a fund of twenty thou- 
sand dollars, contributed equally by the two lead- 
ers of the Erie Ring, Jay Gould and Jim Fiske, and 
by the two leaders of the Tammany Ring, Peter B. 
Sweeny and Bill Tweed. This was not the only 
occasion when these predatory chieftains went into 
partnership. 

While I was still at the law school my contribu- 
tions to the magazines were rejected with exemplary 
speed. In the 'Critic' Sheridan tells us that "when 
they do agree on the stage their unanimity is won- 
derful," and equally wonderful to me then was the 
unanimity of editors. No matter how laboriously 
I might feather my essays, they were homing 
pigeons; and I could always count on their swift 
return. With the modest confidence of youth, I 
was but little discouraged; and while one article 
was vainly paying its round of visits I was already 
engaged upon another. 

At last my two years' attendance at the law school 
came to an end. I was only two months more than 
twenty -one when I managed somehow to answer the 
questions put to me by Professor Dwight. After I 



ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE LAW 153 

had passed the examination, and before the Columbia 
commencement at which I was to receive my di- 
ploma, I was married to Miss Ada Smith of Lon- 
don; and almost immediately I left America to 
spend my honeymoon in Europe. 

We went to London and to Vienna, for the exposi- 
tion. But it was in the outskirts of Paris that I 
had the unforgettable experience which comes only 
once in the life of every author. In 1870 my father 
had ordered a picture from Thomas Couture thru 
a well-known firm of picture-dealers, to whom he 
had paid in advance half of the price. But he had 
not received his painting; and in that summer of 
1873 he discovered that Couture had never received 
any of the money. In the stress of the Franco- 
Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, and the disorder 
of the Commune, the picture-dealers had diverted 
to their own immediate needs the advance payment 
intrusted to them to transmit to the artist. Under 
pressure they proffered some sort of apology, and 
paid over the money to Couture, who had stopped 
work on the half-completed picture. My father 
naturally desired to see his purchase; and one after- 
noon we all went out to the painter's house in the 
environs. And there on a table in Couture's studio 
my eye discovered the pale-green covers of the Gal- 
axy — the least likely of all periodicals to be dis- 
playing its verdure in the home of an artist as Gallic 
as Couture. It was the number for August, which 
I had not yet seen. I seized it, and with a thrill of 
unexpected joy I discovered my own name in the 
table of contents. 



154 THESE MANY YEARS 

There I was, printed in the pages of a monthly 
magazine, and in the best of good company. While 
the others of our party were gazing at the painting 
which was the object of our visit, I looked at the 
magazine which at that moment had a larger im- 
portance for me; and I wondered how a number of 
the Galaxy had so mysteriously and so promptly 
wandered to that strange place. The explanation 
was as simple as that of most mysteries — a sister 
of Colonel Wm. C. Church, the editor of the Galaxy, 
was an art student in Couture's studio, and it was 
she who had left the magazine casually where I had 
chanced to see it. 



VI 

When we had arrived in Paris in June, 1873, I 
found to my great regret that I was too late to see 
the special exhibition of books and prints and other 
objects of interest connected with Moliere, and col- 
lected that spring to commemorate the two hun- 
dredth anniversary of his death. Six years earlier 
my father had bought one of the cleverest of J. L. 
Gerome's painted epigrams, the 'Moliere chez Louis 
XIV,' depicting the apocryphal breakfasting of the 
actor with the monarch; and perhaps it was the 
presence of this painting constantly before my eyes 
which had awakened my ambition to write a biog- 
raphy of Moliere whenever I might feel myself less 
incompetent for the arduous undertaking. Altho I 
did prepare one brief magazine article on Moliere 
half-a-dozen years later, and altho I did review a 



ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE LAW 155 

host of books about him from time to time, I was 
not able to fulfil my wish for nearly forty years 
after I had first formed it in 1872, as my study of 
Moliere's stage-craft did not get itself into print 
until 1910. 

While we were in Paris I went frequently to the 
play, delighting more especially in the varied per- 
formances of the Comedie Francaise, but not neglect- 
ing the other theaters. For instance, one evening 
we had the good fortune to see an admirable per- 
formance of Sardou's amusingly ingenious 'Pattes 
de Mouche,' known in English as the 'Scrap of 
Paper,' and to be accepted as the most glittering 
example of his dramaturgic dexterity. The clever 
hero and the clever heroine, whose duel of wits sup- 
plies the essential strength which sustains the in- 
terest of the artificial comedy, were undertaken that 
evening by Raphael Felix and by Anais Fargueil. 
Felix was a brother of Rachel, and he was reputed to 
be a dull man in private life, altho on the stage he 
was a brilliant impersonator of brilliant men of the 
world. Sardou was the most adroit and inventive 
of stage-managers, and he had specially trained 
Fargueil to interpret his very clever leading ladies, 
teaching her (so he himself once told Sarcey) many 
of the histrionic effects which he had observed in 
Ristori, a past mistress of all the tricks of the trade. 
This evening at the Vaudeville lingers in my memory, 
not only because of the liveliness of the play and the 
perfect team-work of the cast, but also because we 
happened in one of the intermissions of that warm 
September night to have the good fortune of a 



156 THESE MANY YEARS 

pleasant little chat with the Bancrofts (afterward 
Sir Squire and Lady Bancroft), who were then 
managing the Prince of Wales's Theater, the play- 
house in London which most closely resembled the 
Vaudeville in Paris. 

One other recollection of that summer of 1873 may 
deserve record. On our way back from Vienna to 
Paris we went to Ischl and then to Lucerne. That 
was the year when the rack-and-pinion railroad up 
the Rigi was opened to the top; and, as it chanced, 
the cars went up to the Kulm for the first time on 
July 14, the day of our ascent. We were passen- 
gers the second time the single train made the 
journey up; we enjoyed the marvellous panorama 
of ice-clad peaks unrolled before our eyes when we 
stood on the observation tower; and then we went 
back to the tiny train — only to find that every seat 
in the two or three cars had been taken by the 
sightseers who had arrived on the previous trip. It 
seemed as tho we should have to wait over three or 
four hours for the train to go down and to climb 
back; and this would have upset our own time- 
table, as we had made arrangements to leave Lu- 
cerne that afternoon. 

Fortunately for us, this was the first day of the 
completed railroad, and not a few of those on the 
top of the mountain had been carried up in the 
earlier manner, in chairs slung on poles, and borne 
by two stout porters. Nowadays these outworn 
devices have disappeared, driven out by the rail- 
road, which saves the traveller time and money. 
But on that midsummer afternoon there were a 



ON THE THRESHOLD OF THE LAW 157 

dozen chairs ranged in a row, with their bearers eager 
to be hired. I engaged two of them, and I offered 
the porters to double their usual pay if they could 
get us down the mountain to the landing on the 
lake at Weggis in time to meet the boat which would 
have picked up at Vitznau the passengers on the 
overcrowded cars. The bearers jumped at the offer 
and we started off at once under the amused gaze 
of the occupants of the train. I bought an alpen- 
stock, and I walked down all the steeper places, 
letting the porters relieve each other in carrying 
my wife's chair, and having them carry me only on 
the occasional level stretches. I doubt whether 
any chairs had ever been borne down the steep 
sides of the Rigi as rapidly as ours; and the porters 
earned their extra reward, getting us to the lake-side 
at Weggis just as the steamboat from Vitznau was 
drawing up to it. And I can see again the surprise 
in the faces of the passengers on the boat who had 
been passengers on the train when they perceived 
that the old-fashioned chairs had been swifter than 
the new-fangled cars. 

Early in the fall we returned to New York and 
took a house at Orange. When we were settled 
there I began to go regularly to my father's office. 
I was twenty-one; school and college and law school 
were behind me, and before me a career totally 
unlike that which my father had planned for me, 
and yet far better fitted to my taste and to my 
capacity. 



CHAPTER VIII 
NEW YORK IN THE EARLY SEVENTIES 



I HAD not been making the morning trip from 
Orange to New York for more than a month 
when I discovered there was little or nothing 
for me to do in my father's office, and that, in fact, 
I was only a fifth wheel, useless except in case of 
accident. Those whom I found already engaged in 
the work were accustomed to carry all its burdens. 
The only opportunities open to me were those of a 
supplementary office-boy, or of a more or less need- 
less private secretary to my father. 

He was not engaged in any business except the 
management of his own property, which consisted 
almost wholly of office-buildings in the immediate 
vicinity of the Stock Exchange. He had a few 
other buildings in the more mercantile part of 
Broadway; but most of his holdings were in the 
Wall Street neighborhood, and were occupied by 
bankers, brokers, and lawyers. The 1st of May 
was then the annual moving-day, and for a month 
or two earlier my father's advertisement proffered 
offices in Nos. 19 Wall Street; 55 and 51 Exchange 
Place; 4, 6, 11, 17, 19, 21, and 38 Broad Street; 
17, 19, 34, 36, 49, and 53 New Street; and 38, 39, 
40, 42, 57, 64, 66, 69, 71, 73, 78, and 80 Broadway. 

158 



NEW YORK IN THE SEVENTIES 159 

This was an imposing list of buildings to belong to 
one man; and it was without surprise that our office 
was not infrequently taken to be a real-estate 
broker's, and that owners of other property came in 
to ask us to take charge of it. All these buildings 
owned by my father in 1873 have since been torn 
down to be replaced by sky-scrapers. Among them 
are the towering structures known as the Mills Build- 
ing, the Empire Building, the Wilks Building, and 
the Union Trust Building; and their present rentals 
are several times what they were when my father 
was the owner of the land on which they stood. 

Yet the annual returns were not insignificant 
even then, as his rent-roll in the year when I 
entered the office was more than half a million 
dollars. It is true that these properties were all 
more or less mortgaged, as my father was quite 
willing to pay six per cent — the customary interest 
on a loan in those days — in the certainty that he 
could put out the borrowed money to better advan- 
tage in the purchase of other buildings which in 
his hands would bring in ten or twenty per cent on 
their cost. He knew also that he could retire all 
his mortgages if he chose from the rentals of four 
or five years. But he did not so choose, as he had 
undertaken to complete a railroad in North Carolina; 
and this enterprise was fatally wrecked by the panic 
of 1873. My father raised money by second mort- 
gages and by selling his works of art and his pic- 
tures (including the Couture and the Gerome). By 
stretching his credit to the utmost he completed the 
railroad, only to find that it was little more profita- 



160 THESE MANY YEARS 

ble as a whole than it had been as a fragment. In 
February, 1876, the situation was made much worse 
by a fire which destroyed 444 to 452 Broadway. 
And thus it was that in the four or five years that I 
remained in his office, the years that followed the 
panic of 1873, in which so many others were carried 
under, he was forced to part with all his holdings in 
New York, being left with only the doubtful securi- 
ties of the Southern road. 

Only when his property had finally departed, only 
when the deeds to the new purchasers had been 
signed, sealed, and delivered, did we realize finally 
that the end had come. Until the very last we had 
kept on hoping against hope; and we had gone 
thru an endless succession of fluctuations of feeling, 
now believing that it might be possible to pull thru 
somehow and then cast down suddenly by some 
unforeseen turn of events. Ten years after these 
long months of incessant and unavailing struggle, I 
read the 'Rise of Silas Lapham' with astonished ad- 
miration for the miraculous veracity with which 
Howells had represented the downfall of his hero's 
fortunes with its unending alternations of hope and 
despair, until at last he is left in no doubt as to his 
defeat. 

In my father's case the situation was complicated 
by a series of intricate lawsuits; in fact, the full ex- 
tent of his losses was not made clear to him until a 
few months before his death in 1887. He always 
believed himself to be richer than he was; and to the 
very end he had high hopes for the future when- 
ever the tide should turn. But the tide did not turn, 



NEW YORK IN THE SEVENTIES 161 

for when his estate was settled we found that he 
was without debts, and almost without assets. In 
the last years he was worn by constant physical 
suffering, and harassed by the returning cycle of 
financial disappointments; but he was still stout of 
heart, courageous, and cheerful. When he died he 
was broken in health but unbroken in spirit. 

It has seemed to me best to condense into these 
brief paragraphs the record of a long struggle, at 
the end of which I found myself in a totally different 
position from that which I occupied at the begin- 
ning. I had been educated to be an administrator 
of millions; and from that calling I was entirely 
cut off. I have often asked myself whether the loss 
of the wealth I had expected to inherit was for me 
a bane or a boon; I have wondered whether my later 
life would have been as rich, as varied, as happy as 
it has been, if I had been permitted to practise the 
profession of millionaire. The question is idle, I 
suppose; yet I cannot help believing that on the 
whole I have been a gainer rather than a loser as 
the result of the departure of my father's fortune. 
The possession of unearned wealth is rarely a bless- 
ing; and I think I know myself well enough to have 
serious doubts whether for me it might not have 
been a curse. Quite possibly my father's money 
had done everything it could for me when it gave me 
all the opportunities of my youth, even if I had not 
profited by them as I might; and when it faded 
away finally it left me none the worse. 



162 THESE MANY YEARS 



II 

When I entered it my father's office was in 4 and 
6 Broad Street, next to the corner of Wall Street; 
and a few months later it was removed to 71 Broad- 
way, which my father had called the Empire Build- 
ing. I may note that when the Sixth Avenue ele- 
vated railroad was constructed (to be opened in 
1878) my uncle's cordial relations with George M. 
Pullman, who was largely instrumental in the 
building of the road, resulted in the utilization of 
the main hall of the Empire Building as a thorofare 
for the passengers who desired to get to Broadway 
as directly as possible. Our office overlooked the 
graveyard of Trinity; and I often spent my nooning 
in its restful placidity, sometimes alone and some- 
times in company with my law-school classmate, 
Laughton, then a clerk in the Subtreasury. We 
often planned to climb the tower of Trinity to the 
base of the spire, but this project was constantly 
postponed, and never achieved at last. More than 
thirty years later I went up to the top of the new 
Empire Building, the stately sky-scraper which had 
replaced the shabby four-story warehouses my 
father had altered into offices; and when I came 
out on the roof I found myself level with the tip- 
top of the spire of Trinity, to the base of which 
Laughton and I had planned to climb for a view 
not then otherwise attainable. 

In those remote days a diploma from the Columbia 
Law School entitled its possessor to admission to 



NEW YORK IN THE SEVENTIES 163 

the bar; and on application I was authorized to 
practise as attorney and counsellor at law. Of this 
privilege I never availed myself except that on two 
or three occasions, in the course of our interminable 
litigations, I appeared in court to ask for postpone- 
ments. The one indisputable benefit I derived 
from my stay in the law school was a sincere convic- 
tion that I did not know law enough to be my own 
lawyer. I have never been attracted to the practice 
of law, even with myself as a sole client. And 
altho I spent four or five years in the turmoil of 
the stock-market, I was never lured into "taking a 
flier." My father's stock-broker tenants would often 
give him tips, and urge him to risk a little to make 
a large profit; but he always refused to speculate. 
I must have inherited his distaste for these aleatory 
delights, having no more desire as a young man to 
gamble in Wall Street than I had had as a lad to 
gamble at Homburg and Baden-Baden. 

My father had no hesitation in venturing his 
money in support of his reasoned opinion as to the 
course of events here and abroad which would ulti- 
mately control prices ; but he was emphatic in deny- 
ing that this was speculating. He refused to ad- 
mit that his earlier operations in cotton and in corn, 
in breadstuffs, and in hog-products up and down the 
Mississippi were fairly to be termed speculations. 
In his eyes a speculator was a man who did not use 
his brains, relying merely on brute luck. And he 
held it unfair to dismiss as a speculator a man who 
exercised his imagination to interpret the world- 
wide conditions which would necessarily cause the 



164 THESE MANY YEARS 

future fall or rise of prices. This interpretative 
imagination my father possessed in a high degree, 
and conscious of its possession he enjoyed exercising 
it. After the Civil War was over he devoted himself 
to his real estate and kept out of the market; but 
he persevered in his analysis of the underlying con- 
ditions. 

Twice only while I was in his office, and then 
mainly to assist me, was he moved to profit by his 
insight; and on both of these occasions he took me 
in with him. Once we bought cotton and once we 
bought mess-pork, and the two little ventures amply 
justified his foresight. He had suggested that I go 
in to "make my rent." I was so little carried away 
by the gambling spirit that I took my own profit as 
soon as my half of our gains equalled the sum I 
had to pay my landlord. I had perfect confidence 
in my father's judgment about going into an opera- 
tion, but I was not quite so assured as to his judg- 
ment about coming out, since he was ever inclined 
to be oversanguine. In both of our joint opera- 
tions he held on a little longer than I did; and in 
neither case did his return from his insight equal 
mine. 

The rent that I made by these ventures went to 
landlords in New York, for we had spent only a 
winter in Orange. On our return to the city we 
boarded for a few weeks at 45 Fifth Avenue, in a 
house kept by a sister of Bret Harte, then in the 
first flush of his success in the East. He used to 
come to his sister's house for his letters; and to my 
surprise I heard her children greet him as "Uncle 



NEW YORK IN THE SEVENTIES 165 

Frank" — a greeting which reminded me that on 
his earlier title-pages he had signed himself "F. 
Bret Harte." Our stay in this boarding-house was 
but brief, as we soon took a house in East 20th Street, 
between Broadway and Fourth Avenue, almost op- 
posite the modest dwelling where Colonel Roosevelt 
was then living as a boy. In 1877 we removed to 
an apartment in Stuyvesant Square. This house is 
recognizable in the earlier pages of Howells's 6 Hazard 
of New Fortunes.' When we went there it already 
sheltered Richard Grant White, and before we 
moved out in 1881 it had become the home of H. C. 
Bunner. 

I suppose that Stanford White must then have 
been residing with his father, but I do not recall 
ever having met him in the spacious hall. He and 
McKim and William R. Mead were all of them at 
one time or another in the office of H. H. Richard- 
son, who was a tenant of my father's in 57 Broad- 
way; and I went to Richardson's office more than 
once to present the monthly bill for the rent. It was 
in this humble capacity of rent-collector that I first 
met Edmund Clarence Stedman, then a member of 
the Stock Exchange, and also a tenant of ours. 

Ill 

As I had no definite duties in the office, I did all 
sorts of odd jobs: I went to collect the rents; I re- 
wrote my father's letters, as his impatient hand- 
writing had come to be difficult for those who were 
not used to it; and I did occasional errands. On 



166 THESE MANY YEARS 

one of those errands to our stationers I fell into talk 
with the senior partner, a son of the Beadle who 
had published the yellow-backed Dime Novels I 
had devoured in boarding-school. The chief sale 
of this series of innocuous but exciting fiction had 
been among the soldiers, and its circulation waned 
when the million men under arms in 1865 dwindled 
rapidly to a scant hundred thousand. Not only 
did the sale fall off, but the publishers found increas- 
ing difficulty in procuring the primitive kind of tale 
which alone suited the simple tastes of its expectant 
customers. Young Beadle told me in the course of 
our casual talk that a stranger had recently entered 
his father's office with a roll of manuscript under 
his arm and with these words on his lips: "Mr. 
Beadle, you have published two hundred and fifty- 
three Dime Novels; I have read them all; and I 
think I know at last what you want. Here's a 
story I have written especially for you!" And as 
it happened this modest author's confidence was 
justified and his tale was promptly accepted. 

Having no absorbing duties in the office, I was not 
diligent in attendance, and I had abundant leisure 
for my own writing. I continued to contribute to 
the Galaxy; and in one of my papers, entitled the 
'Parody of the Period,' I quoted a scrap of rime 
by George W. Cable, then an unknown newspaper 
man in New Orleans — to his immediate delight, as 
this was the first occasion when anything of his had 
received any recognition, so he told me later when 
I came to have the privilege of his friendship. These 
earlier Galaxy articles seem to me now rather juvenile; 



NEW YORK IN THE SEVENTIES 167 

none the less was I puffed with pride when my name 
appeared every three or four months in the Galaxy's 
table of contents. A few years later I read Douglas 
Jerrold's gibe against a youthful writer who had 
made a premature appearance in print, to the effect 
that "he had taken down the shutters before he 
had anything to put in the shop-windows"; and I 
blushed with an acute perception that the British 
wit all unknowingly had transfixed me with his 
casual shaft. 

I became in time an occasional contributor also 
to Appleton's Journal, edited by Oliver Bell Bunce 
(afterward the compiler of the monitory 'Don't'); 
to Lippincott's, then edited by John Foster Ejrk, 
the historian; to Leslie's Popular Monthly, then 
edited by another historian, John Gilmary Shea; 
and to Scribner's Monthly (soon to become the 
Century), then edited by J. G. Holland, assisted by 
Richard Watson Gilder. I have kept all these early 
efforts at magazining; and as I run them over I 
note that I was slowly giving up the field of the 
curiosities of literature and centering my efforts 
more and more on topics connected with the theater. 
To the Atlantic, then edited by Howells, and to 
Harper s I did not win admission until perhaps half- 
a-dozen years after I had begun to contribute to the 
Galaxy, For the International Review (not yet taken 
in charge by Henry Cabot Lodge and John T. 
Morse) I wrote several signed book-reviews; and 
when I went to ask for payment from the editor — 
whose name I now forget — he put me off with the 
assertion that the contributors to his magazine re- 



168 THESE MANY YEARS 

ceived a twofold reward: first, the signal honor of 
appearing in its pages, and second, an honorarium 
in money, the exiguity of the latter being propor- 
tioned to the altitude of the former. 

The monthly magazines were not many in the 
years between 1871 and 1880, nor were the week- 
lies. The daily newspapers of New York were 
stronger than they had ever been before or than 
they have ever been since — stronger in the ability 
and in the character of the men who were making 
them. I do not think that I err in believing that 
metropolitan journalism touched its topmost mark 
in that decade. The Evening Post was still edited 
by William Cullen Bryant; it had lost John Bigelow, 
but it retained Parke Godwin; and it had John R. 
Thompson for its literary critic. The Times had 
made its triumphant exposure of the Tweed Ring, 
probably as notable a public service as any journal 
was ever able to render to its constituency. The 
World was directed by Manton Marble, and it had 
a literary flavor not unlike that of the Parisian 
papers. Ivory Chamberlain, Wm. Henry Hurlbert 
(who succeeded Marble as editor when the control 
of the paper was acquired by Jay Gould), and Mont- 
gomery Schuyler were the regular editorial writers, 
joined on occasion by Sidney Webster and George 
Ticknor Curtis. The literary and art critic was 
Wm. C. Brownell, and the dramatic critic was A. 
C. Wheeler, who signed "Nym Crinkle" (and who 
still revealed a certain independence of judgment 
that departed later). The lighter writers were Wm. 
L. Alden, R. H. Newell ("Orpheus C. Kerr"), 



NEW YORK IN THE SEVENTIES 169 

and George T. Lanigan, the author of the delicious 
Fables — "anywhere, anywhere out of the World." 
The sporting editor was Major H. G. Crickmore — 
"Krik" — a man who won the sincere regard of all 
who came to know him. 

Notable as was the staff of the World, it was not 
as strong or as solid as the staff of the Tribune when 
Whitelaw Reid took charge after Horace Greeley's 
fatal candidacy of the presidency in 1872. Chief 
among the editorial writers was John Hay, who had 
for associates Noah Brooks, Isaac H. Bromley, and 
Charles T. Congdon. The literary critic was George 
Ripley, the founder of Brook Farm; the art critic 
was Clarence Cook; the musical critic was John R. 
G. Hassard; and the dramatic critic was William 
Winter. The exchange editor was Bronson Howard. 
The Washington correspondent was Z. L. White; 
the London correspondent was G. W. Smalley; and 
the Paris correspondent was Wm. H. Huntington. 
From Paris there also came fortnightly contributions 
from Arsene Houssaye and from Henry James. 
Louise Chandler Moulton wrote literary letters from 
Boston; E. V. Smalley reported on Western condi- 
tions; and Bayard Taylor roamed at large. Nor is 
this list complete, since it ought to include also 
E. L. Burlingame and C. C. Buel, Kate Field, and 
"Gail Hamilton." Nor can omission be made also 
of the fact that the Tribune had the habit of report- 
ing in full the more important lectures and ad- 
dresses which might be made in New York, such as 
those by Huxley and by Tyndall. 



170 THESE MANY YEARS 



IV 

A weekly paper occupies an anomalous position 
between the daily and the monthly, tending some- 
times toward journalism pure and simple, and some- 
times striving to attain standards more deliberately 
literary. In the period of which I am now writing, 
altho there were occasional attempts to establish 
American imitations of the Saturday Review or the 
Spectator, the more abject colonialism of twenty or 
thirty years earlier had been killed by the Civil 
War. My mother used to tell me that the one 
weekly which came to her father's house, and later 
to her own, was the Albion, the organ of the British 
who had migrated to America, a paper as exclusively 
insular as its title implied. It was significant of 
our willingness to depend upon London for literature 
and even for critical evolution of American authors, 
that the sole weekly which penetrated into culti- 
vated circles was this which was edited by Britons 
for Britons, altho its circulation was mainly among 
Americans. No wonder is it that in the 'Fable for 
Critics' in 1848 Lowell had protested against the 
writing that 

suits each whisper and motion 
To what will be thought of it over the ocean. 

Harper's Weekly, altho originally modelled on the 
Illustrated London News, had departed widely from 
its prototype; its editorial page was then in the con- 



NEW YORK IN THE SEVENTIES 171 

trol of George William Curtis, whose political and 
social articles, at once graceful and forceful, were 
very vigorously supported by the sledge-hammer 
cartoons of Thomas Nast. The Independent, edited 
by Theodore Tilton,. had its many readers, but as I 
did not happen to be among them then, I can now 
supply no opinion in regard to its merits. The 
Round Table, founded in 1866, and managing to 
exist for only a very few years, was typical of the 
recurring effort to reproduce the London literary and 
political weekly. In this decade of 1871-1880 I 
contributed now and again to several short-lived 
weeklies of lofty ambition and of inadequate capital. 
One of these was the Arcadian, edited for a little 
space by an Englishman, John Fraser. Another was 
the Library Table, edited by H. L. Hinton. And 
toward the end of the ten years I did not a little 
critical writing for the American, published weekly, 
not in New York, but in Philadelphia, and supported 
by the ample means of Wharton Barker. 

In 1875 I made my first contribution to the Nation, 
then a weekly of lofty ambition and of high achieve- 
ment. For the Nation I was to write constantly for 
twenty years, ceasing in 1895; and I was even a 
small stockholder for a little while, from 1877 to 
1881, when I sold out at a slight loss. During those 
two decades I was responsible for the reviewing of 
almost every book which dealt in any way with the 
history of the theater, including the biographies 
and autobiographies of actors. There were certain 
other topics that I treated as books appeared, topics 
as varied as book-bindings, playing-cards, fans, and 



172 THESE MANY YEARS 

in general the curiosities of literature in which I 
still retained my interest. As I was reading a 
wide selection of contemporary French books I was 
able to send in brief notes and longer reviews upon 
volumes not likely otherwise to receive any atten- 
tion. I recall that my first article was, on the 
'Almanach des Spectacles,' while my second was a 
review of George Henry Lewes's most suggestive 
essays 'On Actors and the Art of Acting.' Altho 
I more than once ventured into the field of politics, 
I rarely strayed outside of the narrow domain of the 
drama, and the broader region of literature at large. 
When I began to write for it the Nation was ten 
years old; it had been modelled on the London 
Spectator; and it had at last succeeded in establish- 
ing itself solidly. It paid its way; and it distrib- 
uted meager dividends on the sixty thousand dollars' 
capital which had been raised to sustain it after an 
earlier enforced reorganization due to its dilapi- 
dated financial condition after its cradle struggles — 
after that perilous second summer which is as likely 
to be fatal to a journalistic bantling as to any other 
infant. Its circulation was printed in every issue; 
and in 1875 this exceeded thirteen thousand copies. 
During the Hayes and Tilden presidential campaign 
of the next year, the circulation shrank to less than 
half of what it had been, owing to the inability of 
its editor to make up his mind which of the two can- 
didates he ought to support; and this decline was 
bravely recorded week by week until the figures fell 
below seven thousand, and then they ceased to ap- 
pear. 



NEW YORK IN THE SEVENTIES 173 

The editor was Edwin Lawrence Godkin, who re- 
tained sole control of its political policy, delegating 
the management of its book-reviewing to Wendell 
Phillips Garrison; and it was with Garrison, there- 
fore, that I had the most to do, altho in later years 
I came to know Godkin better. Garrison was a 
son of William Lloyd Garrison; he had been a 
printer; and to his fine taste and his meticulous 
carefulness was due the typographical integrity of 
the paper. He was a generous editor, winning the 
affectionate regard of his contributors. He often 
rejected articles of mine, and he occasionally made 
excisions in them; but he never suggested any modi- 
fication of the opinions I had expressed. He had 
confidence in my special knowledge of the topics 
which I treated; and he let me say my say in my 
own fashion without any interference. 

Godkin was a man of remarkable character and 
of strong personality; and I do not think that the 
exact nature of his public service or of his peculiar 
ability has been properly stated. He has been called 
a political thinker of marked originality; and this 
to my mind is exactly what he was not. He was a 
very clever Scotch-Irishman, who had been trained 
in the school of Mill and Macaulay, and who was 
grounded in the political economy of the Manchester 
school. He was clear-headed, but he was never 
open-minded. He seemed to many of his admirers 
to be an original thinker because he was able to 
apply to American conditions the principles he had 
absorbed in his youth in England. These, as it 
happened, were precisely the principles which needed 



174 THESE MANY YEARS 

to be applied here in the United States in the years 
that followed the Civil War. Hard money, free 
trade, home rule, the merit system, all needed to 
be expounded to the American people; and God- 
kin expounded them with unflagging energy and un- 
failing felicity of illustration. 

He was a born journalist, with wit at his command 
and with irony in abundance — altho irony is never 
a potent weapon of persuasion. When at last the 
fight was won, when we had been converted to hard 
money and free trade, to home rule and to the merit 
system, and when other problems of other kinds 
needed to be faced, Godkin found himself at sea. 
His political writing then lost much of its force; and 
in the later years of his life he had ceased to be a 
leader. He was impervious to every new idea in 
sociology or in statecraft; when he died he was 
limited to the beliefs he had held when he immi- 
grated to America. His faith in the future failed 
him; he sank into a praiser of past times and a dis- 
parager of the present. He came to feel that a 
people that would no longer listen to his advice 
must be on the road to ruin; and his main regret 
was — as he once expressed it to an associate — 
that he would not live to see the fulfilment of his 
prophecies of evil. 

The office staff of the Nation was small: Godkin 
himself, Garrison, a second writer on politics to re- 
lieve Godkin, and also a writer on literary themes. 
For a long period Arthur G. Sedgwick was Godkin's 
chief assistant as a political contributor; and at 
one time or another the literary critic in the office 



NEW YORK IN THE SEVENTIES 175 

was Howells or William C. Brownell. Most of the 
reviewing was then distributed to outside experts 
of high distinction. With the probable excep- 
tion of the Saturday Review in its earliest days, I 
doubt if any weekly in our language has ever had 
so competent a body of reviewers. J. D. Cox, 
J. G. Palfrey, Francis Walker, James Russell Lowell, 
Thomas R. Lounsbury, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry 
James were all frequent contributors of criticisms 
upon contemporary books. The chief London cor- 
respondent was James Bryce; and the Paris corre- 
spondent was Auguste Laugel, a man of varied in- 
terests, to be remembered gratefully by all Americans 
because he had kept the Revue des Deux Mondes on 
the side of the Union all thru the dark days of the 
Civil War. 



Altho my contributions to the Nation were not 
important, I was proud of being permitted to stand 
by the side of my seniors, and to be enrolled in their 
goodly company. Yet this did not prohibit me 
from less serious associations; and when Puck, 
which had been founded by Keppler and Schwartz- 
mann in the fall of 1876 as a German paper, began 
to appear also in English, under the editorship of 
Sidney Rosenfeld, I became one of its contributors. 
Rosenf eld's foremost assistant was H. C. Bunner, 
who succeeded him as editor shortly after I made 
his acquaintance. With Bunner I formed a friend- 
ship which endured unclouded until his untimely 



176 THESE MANY YEARS 

death a little less than a score of years later. What 
that friendship meant to me I tried to express in an 
article written immediately after he died, and now 
included in my volume called the 'Historical Novel 
and Other Essays.' But it is grateful again to re- 
cord the closeness of the ties which bound us to- 
gether. 

We were keenly interested in the same things; our 
tastes were acutely sympathetic, and our education 
and experience had fitted us for friendship. He was 
only two years younger than I, but he had matured 
earlier. At our first meeting we felt at once a sense 
of intimacy that ripened as we came to know each 
other better. We lived later in the same house; 
we talked over our hopes and ambitions; we read 
each other's manuscripts and we revised each other's 
proof-sheets; we wrote two short-stories in partner- 
ship; he dedicated his first book of poems to me; 
and I inscribed to his memory the first volume I 
published after his death. He was only twenty- 
three when I met him, and he was already master 
of a beautifully limpid prose style, and already a 
dexterous versifier, not yet aware of the deeper 
notes he was soon to strike both in verse and in 
prose. 

In a paper published in the Atlantic not long after 
the demise of Punchinello, its editor, Charles Daw- 
son Shanly, declared that what a comic paper needed 
most of all was not so much a group of occasional 
contributors of scintillating papers as two or three 
writers who could be relied upon week in and week 
out to supply their stint of "comic copy." By this 



NEW YORK IN THE SEVENTIES 177 

test Bunner was an ideal contributor, for he could 
elaborate the scintillating papers and he could also 
improvise the innumerable paragraphs, squibs, quips, 
local hits, which were absolutely essential to keep 
the paper going. There were weeks when more 
than half of the matter in Puck was provided by 
him — and provided easily, without any sign of 
strain. He combined felicity and fecundity; and 
he never relaxed the loyalty of his service to Puck, 
even when he had won a larger audience by his 
more ambitious prose and verse. The cartoons 
which Keppler designed were often suggested by 
Bunner, just as Tenniel's in Punch were rarely of 
his own invention, but indicated to him by the 
editorial council at the famous Wednesday dinners. 
While Bunner controlled its policy, Puck was a 
comic paper which was more than a comic paper, 
because its editor had serious views upon the ques- 
tions of the day. There was no more persuasive 
discussion of the tariff than that which Bunner pro- 
vided on the editorial page of Puck after Cleveland 
had declared that "a condition and not a theory 
confronts us." No political writing on that compli- 
cated problem was ever simpler than Bunner's, nor 
was any more easily understandable by the casual 
and careless reader. There was never a hint of 
condescension in his manner of explaining the prin- 
ciples he was advocating, and he combined candor 
and clarity. I did not appreciate the full merit of 
these editorials of his until he once summoned me 
suddenly to write a page of them for him when he 
had to prepare a copy of verses to accompany the 



178 THESE MANY YEARS 

pictorial tribute to be paid to Grant, who had just 
been vanquished in his brave fight with death. I 
did my best to recapture the appealing directness of 
Bunner's manner; but I could not help feeling that 
I had not succeeded to my own satisfaction. 

My ordinary contributions to Puck amused me at 
least as much as they could have amused its readers. 
It was fun to write them; and for perhaps half-a- 
dozen years I kept on turning in comic copy both 
in prose and in verse. I was gratified to find in 
the autobiography of Mrs. Strakosch (Clara Louise 
Kellogg) that she recalled an anonymous triolet I 
had rimed about "Kellogg and Cary and Roze," in 
1878, and still more gratified to discover that she 
attributed it to Bunner. In the summer of 1878 
when I went to Europe I sent back a sequence of 
letters of travel, in which I employed most of the 
traditional formulas of the professional manufac- 
turers of comic copy. 

As I look back over those early years of Puck, I 
can recall a host of clever articles from its various 
contributors, but none of them so clever as Bunner's 
own series, in which he projected the grotesque and 
yet very human personality of the professional poet, 
V. Hugo Dusenbury. Prose and verse of uncertain 
value, but always touched with the quaintness of 
his own personality, was provided incessantly by 
R. K. Munkittrick, whose signature was often sup- 
posed to be a pen-name derived from monkey -trick. 
His comic copy was often mirth-provoking, but it 
lacked a little of the flavor of his talk. 'You know 
that house of mine in the country ?" he said to Bun- 



NEW YORK IN THE SEVENTIES 179 

ner one day in an exaggeration of his habitually 
lugubrious manner. "Well, now I want to sell it, 
people don't even go by in the road — and when I 
didn't want to sell it, they kept coming in thru the 
leaks in the roof with certified checks in their hands !" 
Munkittrick had shared with Bunner and me in 
our deep admiration for the delicate art of Austin 
Dobson, yet his allegiance weakened a little when 
he came later under the spell of Stevenson's * Child's 
Garden.' As was customary with him, he expressed 
in verse his change of heart. I doubt whether he 
ever published this brief metrical criticism, and as 
it tenaciously clung to my memory I make bold to 
preserve here his invocation to the poet whose ban- 
ner he was deserting: 

Austin, Austin, Austin, 

Dobby, Dobby, Dobby, 
Altho writing verses 

Seems to be your hobby, 
Stevenson can take you, 

With Messrs. Gosse and Lang 
And knock your heads together 

With a bang, bang, bang ! 

It was with Bunner that I went one Sunday after- 
noon in 1878 to a meeting of the Rectilinear, as a 
group of four poets entitled themselves, when they 
gathered together to listen to each other's verse. 
These four youthful lyrists were my schoolfellow, 
Francis S. Saltus; a gifted and erratic Irishman, 
John Moran, who was once moved to rime a real 
poem, his 'Ballade of Battle, Murder and Sudden 



180 THESE MANY YEARS 

Death'; George Edgar Montgommery, who be- 
came a little later, and for a brief period only, the 
dramatic critic of the New York Times; and Edgar 
Fawcett, who was the oldest, the best known, and 
by far the ablest of the quartet. The four of them 
used to come together every Sunday afternoon; and 
now and again they invited other youthful bards to 
take part in their shop-talk. They all had a pas- 
sion for poetry, altho their aspiration was more 
obvious than their inspiration; and they all took 
themselves very seriously, especially Fawcett. 

Fawcett has to his credit several volumes of verse, 
two or three plays, and a dozen or a score of novels; 
but he was far more fecund than his few ardent 
admirers knew, since he supported himself by con- 
cocting sensational serials for one of the cheapest 
weekly story-papers. He was the most sensitive 
of poets, with a skin so thin that a falling rose-leaf 
would abrade it. He had emitted a shrill shriek 
when the meter of one of his earliest lyrics had been 
modified for the better by the editor who accepted 
it for the columns of the Evening Post, an insignificant 
correction due to the more delicate ear of William 
Cullen Bryant. Perhaps the most forcible character- 
ization of Fawcett's unfortunate jpeculiarities was 
made in my presence by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 
who knew him even better than I did, and who 
esteemed his poetry more highly. "Yes, Fawcett 
is very touchy; in fact he is so sensitive that he 
reminds me of a human eyeball on a gravel walk, 
where to remain still is impossible, and yet every 
movement is exquisite agony !" 



NEW YORK IN THE SEVENTIES 181 

I attended only one meeting of the Rectilinear. 
I do not know how the peace was kept between 
Fawcett and his brother bards. But it must have 
been enforced somehow, for they sometimes agreed 
so completely as to undertake the composition of a 
sonnet in collaboration. Whether they accomplished 
this metrical feat more than once I cannot say. 
That they did accomplish it once at least is posi- 
tively proved by a sheet of paper in my possession, 
whereon (in the handwriting of Saltus) there are 
fourteen lines on 'Greece/ due to the conjoint 
muses of the quartet, the place of the missing 
Montgommery being taken for once by Bunner. It 
was to Bunner that I owed the manuscript; and he 
explained that the four participants had agreed on 
a topic; they had selected the fourteen riming words; 
they had distributed the quatrains and the tercets, 
one to each of the four — and then they had sever- 
ally and simultaneously been delivered of their re- 
spective shares: 

GREECE 

Land of the Gods that gave us wine and love, 
Those greatest gifts that Fate has given to men, 
Thy shrines in secret honored now, were then 

Circled by maidens, wreathed with flowers above ! 

[John Moran.] 

Oh land that memory will not weary of, 
Deathless though poesy's consecrating pen ! 
Land in whose fadeless groves we hear again, 

Melodious moans from Aphrodite's dove ! 

[Edgar Fawcett.] 



182 THESE MANY YEARS 

Land where white Parthenon's tower in the blue 
Of perfect skies ! and where in woodland green, 
Ghosts of Diana flutter everywhere ! 

[Francis S. Saltus.] 

Ever thy light these cold late days gleams through, 
We stretch our hands to thee, in faint dreams seen, 
Thou to all men, throughout all ages, fair ! 

[H. C. BUNNER.] 



CHAPTER IX 
PARISIAN MEMORIES 



IN recording my trip to Europe in the summer of 
1873 I omitted to set down one incident. I 
had already decided that I wanted to be a 
dramatist, and it had occurred to me that the best 
way to ascertain the practices of the play-maker 
would be to enter the studio of an experienced art- 
ist — in other words, to persuade some older play- 
wright to collaborate with me. After more than 
forty years of observation 'and reflection upon the 
art of dramaturgy I am now even more strongly 
convinced of the inestimable advantage it is for a 
novice to sit at the feet of an older practitioner and 
thus to be initiated into the secrets of the craft. 
Every art has to be acquired; and whatever has to 
be learned can be taught, but it can be taught to 
advantage only by those who have themselves prac- 
tised it. The apprentice painters enroll themselves 
in the class of an older artist; and it would never 
occur to any of them to seek the instruction of a 
mere critic. No teaching can be as intimate and as 
practical as that which is given unconsciously in the 
course of collaboration; and this truth I verified 
later when I had the signal privilege of composing 
a play in partnership with Bronson Howard. 

183 



184 THESE MANY YEARS 

In 1873 the most popular of Parisian playwrights 
was Dennery, the concocter of countless melodramas, 
of which perhaps the most ingeniously contrived 
and the most widely successful was 'Don Cesar de 
Bazan.' And it was to him that I boldly resolved 
to address myself. I had a lot of loose hints for a 
Western play, to be set off with red Indians and red 
blood and red fire; they were the result not of my 
own brief acquaintance with the Chippeways, but 
rather were they the residuum of my reading in 
Edward S. Ellis's contributions to Beadle's Dime 
Novels. I set these stray suggestions in such order 
as I could, and I sought out Dennery. I was told 
that he occupied one of the apartments in a sumptu- 
ous edifice which he had erected near the Arc de 
Triomphe, and there one sunny morning in June I 
betook myself with my notes in my pocket, and with 
hope in my heart struggling against diffidence. 

At the broad door of the immense house which 
testified to the profitableness of play-making in 
France, I asked the porter if M. Dennery was at 
home. 

"Monsieur has only this moment gone out," re- 
sponded the porter. "He cannot be very far." 
And after kindly looking toward the Champs-Elysees 
he added: "There he is now — just at the corner 
— that old gentleman with the white umbrella." 

I thanked the porter and sped in pursuit of the 
playwright. The steps of youth were swifter than 
the pace of age, and I soon came abreast of Dennery, 
who paused courteously at my unexpected self- 
introduction. He was a handsome old gentleman, 



PARISIAN MEMORIES 185 

with fine white hair and very clever eyes. He car- 
ried himself erect, and he wore in his buttonhole the 
red ribbon of the Legion of Honor which in France 
certifies to success. 

However surprised he may have been at my un- 
warranted obtrusion, he listened to me with the ut- 
most courtesy, the white umbrella shading the pair 
of us from the summer sunshine. I explained to 
him that I was a young American, most anxious for 
his counsel and co-operation in the composition of 
a piece upon an American subject. He requested 
me to outline the novel points of my proposed play. 
I did so as best I could, discovering in so doing that 
they seemed suddenly to lack not only novelty but 
value. 

He heard me thru, tolerantly overlooking the 
blunders of my schoolboy French. Then, when I 
had made an end, he told me that my suggestions 
were interesting, very interesting. Yet the piece I 
was proposing belonged to a type which no longer 
tempted him, since he was devoting himself then to 
domestic dramas. " Maintenant, je fais plutot des 
dr antes intimes" And before we parted he advised 
me to apply to a frequent collaborator of his, Ferdi- 
nand Dugue. 

Bacon tells us never to give a reason for a nega- 
tive; and the reason Dennery had given me for his 
negative was not of the best, since the two plays he 
was next to produce were the 'Two Orphans,' and 
'Around the World in Eighty Days,' neither of 
which can be properly classified as a drame intime. 

I did not go to Ferdinand Dugue, who had orig- 



186 THESE MANY YEARS 

inally been my third choice. I went to my second 
choice, Eugene Nus, one of the authors of the French 
originals of the once popular pieces known in English 
as the 'Ticket-of -Leave Man' and the 'Streets of 
New York.' In spite of the popularity of these 
plays, Nus was living in a tiny little apartment on the 
top floor of an old house in a side street. He also 
was a white-haired wearer of the Legion of Honor; 
and his reception of me was even more courteous 
than Dennery's. I had half-a-dozen long talks with 
him, and he convinced me that there was nothing 
in my project for a Wild West piece. But he won- 
dered if there were not other aspects of American 
life which could be made interesting to French play- 
goers; there was, for example, la hi de Lynch. 

I knew as little about Lynch law as Nus could 
know, but I was eager to write a play about any- 
thing, and I had the unfailing confidence of youth. 
So it was that in the course of our several inter- 
views my invention was stimulated, and I sketched 
out a situation which I still believe to be relatively 
new, and probably effective. This pleased Nus, and 
we started in to put together the skeleton of a plot 
with this situation as its backbone. Before we had 
done more than to glimpse its theatrical possibilities 
I had to leave Paris to take up my duties in my' 
father's office. W T hile collaboration is beneficial, it 
cannot be conducted profitably by correspondence; 
and altho Nus and I may have interchanged a letter 
or two, the skeleton of our proposed play did not 
take on any flesh. 

In the spring of 1878, after an absence of five 



PARISIAN MEMORIES 187 

years, I arrived in Paris again; and even before 
going to the Exposition I looked up Nus. I found 
that he had moved to another tiny apartment at 
the top of another old house in another side street. 
I found also when I presented myself that he did 
not at first recognize me, altho his memory returned 
when I put together again the skeleton of the plot 
we had begun to build. Naturally I laid most 
stress on the novel and effective situation I had in- 
vented. 

"Ah," said Nus a little doubtfully, "so it was you 
who suggested that scene?" 

With prompt paternal pride I claimed it for my 
own. 

"Ah," said Nus again, "I had forgotten that — 
and I have since utilized that scene in a play that I 
have been writing with another collaborator." 

There seemed to me to be no need to continue 
the conversation further, and I withdrew. I fol- 
lowed the Parisian stage very carefully in those days, 
and I failed to find in the ensuing years any account 
of any play by Nus in which my situation appeared. 
In fact, I failed to find an account of any new 
piece by Nus, who was then not only an old man, 
but emphatically old-fashioned in his methods. His 
fame had faded long before his death, which took 
place two or three years later. 

Yet, as Nus had seen fit to use my situation in a 
play written with another than its inventor, I felt 
perfectly free to utilize it myself. And I may here 
anticipate so far as to record that a decade or so 
later I joined forces with my friend, George H. 



188 THESE MANY YEARS 

Jessop, in drafting a piece with this situation as its 
center. Oddly enough, our play never saw the light 
of the lamps; and Jessop turned it into a serial 
story, afterward published as a book under the title 
of 'Judge Lynch.' 

II 

As I have not recorded my experiences with Den- 
nery and Nus in their proper chronological place in 
1873, so I also failed to record in its proper place in 
1867 my first interview with Coquelin. I had seen 
him several times at the Theatre Frangais, and I was 
greatly taken by his engaging personality. I was 
then only fifteen, and I was acutely conscious of the 
deficiencies of my French. It occurred to me that 
I might get Coquelin to give me lessons. My father 
highly approved of this, so I looked up the address 
of the accomplished comedian, and rang the door- 
bell of his modest apartment. As it happened, he 
opened the door himself. I proffered my request 
and he declined it courteously. I was only an awk- 
ward boy, stammering a tongue which was not my 
own, and I had no right to suppose that Coquelin 
would care to teach me in the proper use of his deli- 
cately varied language. 

When my sisters went to Paris in 1877 I wrote 
over urging them to apply to Coquelin for instruc- 
tion in delivery, in diction, as the French call it. 
Their French was far better in 1877 than mine had 
been in 1867; and the actor was persuaded to under- 
take their tuition, and to impart to them the tradi- 



PARISIAN MEMORIES 189 

tions of French speech as these have been preserved 
by the Comedie-Frangaise. 

In that winter of 1877-1878 the company of the 
House of Moliere acquitted itself of a filial duty by 
publishing in a limited edition its most precious pos- 
session, the famous Register of La Grange, the day- 
book wherein the actor who was Moliere' s right-hand 
man in the management of the company from which 
the Comedie-Frangaise is proud to claim its direct 
descent, had recorded the plays presented night after 
night, and had set down also the takings at the door. 
My sisters sent me this as a Christmas present, 
and they got Coquelin to enrich it with the signa- 
tures of his comrades, Maubant, Delaunay, and 
Febvre. On the same fly-leaf Coquelin had made a 
declaration of his own artistic faith. He transcribed 
a line from the 'Precieuses Ridicules,' in which he 
was the triumphant impersonator of the voluble and 
conceited Mascarille: "All that I do, I do without 
effort." And to this quotation he had appended: 
"That is not like me. C. Coquelin." 

Introduced by my sisters, Coquelin and I struck 
up an immediate friendship which steadily strength- 
ened with the revolving years, and which terminated 
only with his untimely death in 1909, when he was 
in the plenitude of his powers, and when he was 
about to undertake the 'Chantecler' of Rostand, 
written to display his infinite variety and very prob- 
ably even suggested by his habit of signing himself 
"Coq." In 1878, when I made his acquaintance, his 
reputation was still broadening. At the Theatre 
Frangais he shared the chief comic characters with 



190 THESE MANY YEARS 

Got, a masterly comedian, whose power was, perhaps, 
more intense than Coquelin's, altho his range was 
far more restricted. The Comedie-Frangaise is a 
commonwealth, to use the term best known on the 
American stage; that is to say, the leading actors 
are partners in the enterprise, sharing in the profits 
and paying wages to the performers of the less im- 
portant parts. This was the system at the Globe 
Theater in London, under Elizabeth and James, 
when Shakspere was one of the sharers; and it was 
the system at the Palais Royal in Paris when Mo- 
liere was the chief of the company from which 
the Comedie-Frangaise is lineally derived. 

Altho there is also a manager of the Theatre 
Frangais, appointed by the government and thereby 
becoming one of the sharers, the associated actors 
and actresses, the societaires, more or less manage 
their own affairs in town-meeting. Their engage- 
ments are for life or until retirement after a benefit 
and on a pension; and as they thus feel themselves 
at home in their own theater they have made them- 
selves comfortable. Their greenroom, the foyer des 
artistes, is a stately hall, richly furnished and hung 
with the most important of the many portraits 
and groups of the actors and actresses of the 
past from Moliere's day to the last years of the 
nineteenth century. This greenroom is nightly fre- 
quented not only by the actors themselves and by 
the leading authors of the varied repertory of the 
Theatre Frangais, but also by the leading lovers of 
the histrionic art. And every one of the associates 
has his or her individual dressing-room, not a mere 



PARISIAN MEMORIES 191 

cubby-hole like those assigned to transient strollers 
in our American theaters, but a fairly spacious room 
to be arranged and furnished and decorated in ac- 
cord with the taste of its occupant. 

Coquelin's dressing-room had two windows on 
the street; it was perhaps sixteen or eighteen feet 
square; and small as it was, it had been ingeniously 
divided into three, a narrow entrance hall leading 
into a parlor in front on the street, thus leaving a 
small corner alcove in which the comedian could 
change his costume and his make-up, secluded by 
curtains from the parlor wherein he might be enter- 
taining his friends, who could continue to converse 
with him while he was preparing for his stage work. 
Now and again, in 1878 and afterward in later sum- 
mers when I spent a few weeks in Paris, I would 
make my way up many stairs and along intricate 
corridors to knock at Coquelin's door. It was a 
pleasure merely to be in the little parlor, which so 
completely reflected the many-sided personality of 
the actor. 

When I became acquainted with this reception- 
room its chief adornment was a series of portraits 
of Coquelin in his most important parts, painted by 
one or another of the artists who were his intimate 
friends. These portraits were all of the same size, 
panels perhaps fifteen inches in height, or a little 
taller; and when I first saw them they were only a 
dozen or so. In the course of years the collection 
kept on growing until at last it numbered more than 
a score. After Coquelin's death these panel-portraits 
were reproduced in colored photogravures, issued in 



192 THESE MANY YEARS 

a portfolio and in a very limited edition, so that 
his friends and admirers might possess pictorial 
memorials of his many histrionic achievements. 
The interest of these portraits in character can be 
gauged by the fact that half-a-dozen were painted 
by Friant, two each by Detaille and by Madrazo, 
and others by Boldini, Dagnan-Bouveret, Duez, 
Louis Leloir and Jean Beraud. 

Coquelin was an assiduous collector of pictures, 
appreciating with equal insight their artistic merit 
and their pecuniary value. In later years, when he 
was playing a summer engagement in London, he 
showed me a little Constable he had just purchased; 
and after dwelling on the characteristic beauty of 
the landscape, he added that he believed that Con- 
stables would still rise in price: "Je crois quit y a 
encore quelque chose a faire avec les Constables." He 
had a lovely example of Millet; and on one of his 
visits to New York he purchased a Japanese land- 
scape by John La Farge, pointing out to me that 
he had bought it on its sheer quality, and regardless 
of any difficulty he might have of disposing of it 
in Paris, where there was no assured market for 
American paintings. 

With the young poets he was as friendly as with 
the young painters; and to the poets he was even 
more helpful, making them known by his recitation 
of their verses. Referring one day to the aid that 
Regnier had rendered to Jules Sandeau in the drama- 
tization of 'Mile, de la Seigliere,' he told me that he 
had been of similar assistance to Theodore de Ban- 
ville in the improvement of the plot of 'Gringoire/ 



PARISIAN MEMORIES 193 

in which he was the original and unequalled imper- 
sonator of the brave writer of dangerous ballads. 
When Banville read him the play, it had no more 
theatrical effectiveness than may be found in the 
poet's other pieces, in which dexterity of plotting 
is not conspicuous. Coquelin suggested several in- 
genious complications of the story likely to heighten 
its attractiveness on the stage. Banville turned on 
him with the truculent query: "Then you want me 
to write a play like Monsieur Scribe's ? " 

Now, Scribe was the abomination of desolation to 
all the followers of Theophile Gautier, of whom 
Banville was the chief. 

"Yes," returned Coquelin firmly; "that is exactly 
what I do want you to do." 

"Very well, then," Banville responded; "that is 
what I will do. I will rewrite this play to be like 
one of Scribe's !" 

Probably it is due to these suggestions of the ex- 
perienced actor that 'Gringoire' has had a life in 
the theater, not only in France but in Great Britain 
and the United States, far longer and far more re- 
munerative than fell to the lot of any other of its 
author's attempts at play-making. 

Ill 

Friendly as were Coquelin's relations with poets 
and with painters, his most intimate friend was the 
politician who had proclaimed the republic. Every 
afternoon Gambetta and Coquelin could be seen 
alone together in an open carriage in the Bois de 



194 THESE MANY YEARS 

Boulogne. Nor did the actor lose his intense in- 
terest in public affairs after the sudden and un- 
timely death of Gambetta. He became in time al- 
most equally intimate with Waldeck-Rousseau, the 
chief of the cabinet which was courageous enough 
to undo the hideous wrong done to Dreyfus. Like 
the large majority of the so-called "Intellectuals," 
Coquelin was an ardent advocate of justice in that 
unfortunate affair, which almost threatened to drive 
France to the brink of civil war. 

Interested as he was in politics, in poetry, in paint- 
ing and in the fine arts generally, Coquelin never 
allowed any of these avocations to interfere with his 
vocation — acting. His integrity as an artist was 
beyond reproach. He brought to the art of acting 
extraordinary gifts, an alert personality, a keen in- 
telligence, a supple body, a most mobile face, and a 
clarion voice of marvellous richness and resonance. 
But he never relied on the advantages bestowed by 
nature; he was an indefatigable worker, as untir- 
ing physically as he was mentally. He had a wider 
versatility than any of the other famous actors of 
our time and of various tongues which it has been 
my good fortune to see on the stage; and he had a 
more far-reaching ambition. Primarily, and by gift 
of God and by grace of good teaching, he was a 
comedian, the incomparable representative of the se- 
ries of superb characters which Moliere had created 
two centuries earlier for his own acting. Noth- 
ing more superbly artistic could be imagined than 
his Mascarille in the 'Precieuses Ridicules.' 

He was equally triumphant and equally artistic 



PARISIAN MEMORIES 195 

in old comedies and in new comedies, in character 
parts, firmly grasped and delicately discriminated 
(like the lawyer in 'Mile, de la Seigliere,' the old 
servant in 'La Joie Fait Peur,' and the braggart sot 
in the 'Aventuriere'), in the exuberant and ex- 
aggerated highly colored profile figures of farce (like 
the much-married hero of the ' Surprises du Divorce ' 
and in the ungrateful boaster of the 'Voyage de M. 
Perrichon'). But these comic parts, in which he 
was simply incomparable, reveal only a few of the 
many manifestations of his histrionic merits. Other 
aspects were displayed in the pathetic figures of the 
erring poet in 'Gringoire' and of the self-sacrificing 
cripple in the 'Luthier de Cremone'; in the fast 
young fellow in the 'Fourchambault,' and in the 
decadent duke in the 'Etrangere'; in the lustful and 
treacherous Scarpia in 'La Tosca,' in the devil- 
may-care 'Don Cesar de Bazan,' and in the austere 
and severe directness of old Duval in the ' Dame aux 
Camelias.' He could be all things in all plays, 
with an infinite variety that never staled; and it 
was only in 'Cyrano de Bergerac,' tailor-made to 
his manifold talents, that he was able to reveal his 
many-sidedness in a single play, wherein he was by 
turn comic and pathetic, grotesque and lyric, arti- 
ficial and sincere, burlesque and heroic. 

To insist that he was incomparably the most ver- 
satile actor it has ever been my good fortune to 
study in a heterogeny of parts is not to suggest that 
he was able to divest himself of his own personality 
or to disguise from the spectators that he -was the 
same Coquelin they had seen impersonate a host 



196 THESE MANY YEARS 

of other characters. He knew better than to at- 
tempt this, and he understood his art too well to 
believe that it was desirable, even if attainable. 
No more than any other artist can the actor step 
off his own shadow; and no more than any other 
artist should he seek to do so. He must be able to 
assume characters not his own, and, as the phrase 
is, to "get into their skins" as completely as he can; 
but he still has to wear his own skin underneath 
these superimposed cuticles. It is the actor's own 
individuality which delights us, even when it is for 
the moment expressing itself as the individuality of 
another being. The performers who succeed in so 
completely concealing themselves that we do not 
recognize them in successive parts — if there are 
any such — have never held high rank on the stage; 
and any one of them could have accomplished the 
needless feat only because he was devoid of a com- 
pelling personality of his own. 

Coquelin had the faculty of expressing himself 
most abundantly at the very moment when he was 
most completely impersonating a character abso- 
lutely not himself. In the course of the forty years 
and more that I had studied his art I saw him 
undertake characters of almost every type; and never 
did I have occasion to feel that the part might have 
been better played by another actor — except pos- 
sibly once, when he was cast for Chamillac, the title 
part in a thin and false play of Octave Feuillet's. 
Chamillac was a straight leading man, a misunder- 
stood hero, without wit or humor, without the solid- 
ity of reality, and Coquelin played it admirably. 



PARISIAN MEMORIES 197 

Yet while there was no fault to be found with his 
reserve and with his dignity, I wondered whether 
an inferior performer, of a less constraining artistic 
conscience, might not have falsely made it more 
effective. And I did not have an opportunity to 
see him in the 'Juif Polonais,' known in English as 
the 'Bells.' He told me once that he thought 
Irving's performance was not in accord with the 
intent of the authors, Erckmann-Chatrian, who had 
drawn a far simpler and less tragic figure than that 
presented by the British actor. When I mentioned 
this to William Archer, who had seen both Coquelin 
and Irving in the part, he remarked that he thought 
Coquelin probably in the right in his belief, adding 
that in this case the play was a poor and empty 
thing, becoming valuable only when Irving tran- 
scended its authors' intent and lifted the character 
up into a loftier realm of realistic fantasy. 

I did have the delight of seeing Coquelin as Tar- 
tuffe, another of the parts in which his performance 
was disputed — a part in which he appeared in New 
York, altho never in Paris, to the best of my belief. 
Tartuffe is the only one of Moliere's chief characters 
which he did not devise for his own acting, compos- 
ing the richly comic Orgon for himself, and casting 
the hypocrite to Du Croisy, also a comedian. And 
altho Coquelin could play the villain to perfection, 
as his Scarpia proved, he chose to preserve what he 
held to be Moliere's purpose, and he represented 
Tartuffe as a character fundamentally comic in his 
egotism, his greed, his sensuality. It was a wholly 
satisfactory impersonation, truer to the spirit of 



198 THESE MANY YEARS 

Moliere's masterpiece than any other I have ever 
seen. It rose to the sinister and almost to the 
terrible, at the culminating moment, the marvel- 
lously unexpected turn of the traitor at the climax 
of the fourth act. 

In his youth Coquelin had a good singing voice; 
and he informed me that Auber wanted him to 
cultivate it for light opera. But he had entered 
the conservatory in the class of Regnier, who early 
divined his possibilities and who was so afraid that 
Coquelin's natural endowments and unusual pre- 
cocity would tempt him to neglect the hard work 
essential for mastery of any art, that the teacher 
pretended to discourage his pupil's comic bent, and 
forced him to study the more restrained and less 
exuberant character parts — a training for which 
Coquelin was afterward profoundly grateful. My 
memory of Regnier is but dim, yet I feel sure that 
I am right in thinking that few comedians were ever 
more unlike than he and Coquelin. From Regnier, 
however, Coquelin learned how to compose a char- 
acter; and he also studied to advantage Samson, 
whose method Regnier did not greatly relish. Coque- 
lin, so he explained to me, had found his profit 
in both of these older comedians, and made for him- 
self a style derived partly from the two of them, 
and partly from his own independent observations. 

He described to an inquirer his method of study. 
"When I have to create a part, I begin by reading 
the play with the greatest attention five or six times. 
First, I consider what position my character should 
occupy, on what plane in the picture I must put him. 



PARISIAN MEMORIES 199 

Then I study his psychology, finding out what he 
thinks, what he is morally. I deduce what he 
ought to be physically, what will be his carriage, 
his manner of speaking, his gesture. These char- 
acteristics once decided, I learn the part without 
thinking about it further; then, when I know it, 
I take up my man again, and closing my eyes, I say 
to him: ' Recite this for me.' Then I see him de- 
livering the speech, the sentence I asked him for; 
he lives, he speaks, he gesticulates before me; and 
then I have only to imitate him." 

He used to declare that Moliere, being an actor 
himself, made all his parts relatively easy for his 
actors — that is to say, his speeches lend themselves 
to oral delivery, they fall trippingly off the tongue, 
and they suggest the appropriate gestures. This, 
it may be noted here, is what Shakspere also does, 
and Shakspere was an actor like Moliere, altho ap- 
parently far less prominent in his profession. This 
is what Victor Hugo did not know how to do, not 
being an actor, and indeed being a playwright not 
so much by native gift but by sheer determination, 
by main strength, so to speak. Coquelin discovered 
these defects in Hugo's method when he appeared 
as the Don Cesar of 'Ruy Bias,' and this led him 
to refuse to undertake the Triboulet of the 'Roi 
s'Amuse' (which supplied the plot of the Italian 
'Rigoletto,' and of the British 'Fool's Revenge'). 

After I had seen him in 'Ruy Bias,' Coquelin dis- 
cussed Hugo's plays with me. "The parts in them," 
he said, "are easy enough for actors who do not 
really know their business. But a man who is in 



200 THESE MANY YEARS 

the habit of playing Moliere, of studying out the 
characters he is to impersonate, of going to the 
bottom of them, of turning them inside out — in a 
word, of mastering them, soon finds he can do noth- 
ing with Hugo's parts, because his characters are all 
on the surface; there is nothing beneath. Hugo is a 
great poet, and he scatters beautiful speeches thruout 
all his pieces; but the effect of these exquisite lines 
does not compensate the actor for the want of a 
living, breathing human being to personate. Fail- 
ing to find the humanity in a Hugo character, the 
actor has to fatigue himself with extraneous effects. 
In Don Cesar I could finally discover nothing but 
brilliant speeches and factitious movement. Now 
Don Cesar has only two acts in which to appear; he 
has a few words only in the first and then he bears 
on his shoulders the whole burden of the fourth act. 
That fourth act exhausts me every time I play it; 
and in the theater I am not considered a weakling. 
In the 'Etourdi' I play Mascarille, the most ample 
and the most exacting of all the parts in Moliere; 
and I am quite as fresh at the end of the fifth act 
as I was at the beginning of the first. But I come 
out of the fourth act of 'Ruy Bias' completely used 
up, having had to spend all my strength as an actor 
in filling the void left by the poet." 

Coquelin's conversation was always interesting, 
partly because of his habit of seeking first principles, 
and partly because of the full flavor of his own in- 
dividuality. He wrote as well as he talked; and he 
revealed his acute critical faculty in half-a-score 
little books in which he discussed his own calling 



PARISIAN MEMORIES 201 

('L'Art du Comedien'), several of the leading comic 
characters of Moliere (notably Tartuffe), and sev- 
eral of the contemporary poets who were his 
friends; especially noteworthy is his analysis of 'Un 
Poete Philosophe,' Sully-Prudhomme. Of course, 
he wrote well; all actors do who happen to have 
something to say, since they acquire unconsciously 
vocabulary and style from the parts which they 
are called upon to learn, parts composed by men 
who are liberal with the winged words of poetry, or 
who command a polished prose. 

He let fall to me, by accident, a few years before 
his death, that certain of his friends in the Academie 
Frangaise had suggested his becoming a candidate 
for admission to that august body of men of letters. 
He explained that the intimation that he might be 
welcomed among the Academicians had been very 
grateful to him, but that he was not altogether as- 
sured of the success of his candidacy should he ever 
propose it, since he understood that Brunetiere 
would combat it vehemently. Slight as was Coque- 
lin's literary baggage, it was far weightier than that 
of certain other men who had recently been elected 
— the Duke d'Audifrey-Pasquier, for example, who 
was credited with spelling Academy with two c's. 

IV 

Massing together memories not only of 1878 but 
of 1881 and 1883, and of other years when I hap- 
pened to be in Paris for part of the summer, I must 
here take up my relations with other Frenchmen, 



202 THESE MANY YEARS 

more or less connected with the theater. It was in 
1878 that Coquelin showed me over the Theatre 
Frangais and displayed to me its accumulated trea- 
sures, manuscripts, drawings and engravings, pic- 
tures and statues; and I wrote an account of all 
that I had seen for an American magazine. For 
other American magazines I prepared papers on the 
several Parisian playhouses, utilizing the book of 
Charles Nuitter on the opera, and more especially 
the volume of Francisque Sarcey's 'Comediens et 
Comediennes' which considered the actors and ac- 
tresses of the Comedie-Frangaise. This scattered 
material I rearranged and amplified as best I could; 
and in the spring of 1880 I published it as my first 
book, the 'Theaters of Paris.' In gratitude to 
Coquelin I dedicated the little volume to him; and 
I rejoiced to receive in return a letter in which he 
declared that my appreciations were delicate and 
exact, adding that more than one French critic 
could find in my book suggestions by which they 
might profit. Perhaps a dedicatee could say no 
less; yet the vanity of the author promptly re- 
sponded to this most agreeable titillation. 

In the eighteen months that followed the publi- 
cation of this first book I made ready a second, a 
study of the more important of the 'French Drama- 
tists of the Nineteenth Century'; and this was pub- 
lished in the fall of 1881. Oddly enough, no French 
historian of dramatic literature had then under- 
taken to deal, in detail, with the years in which the 
Romanticist movement had been duly followed by 
the Realistic movement. I was plowing a field which 



PARISIAN MEMORIES 203 

the French themselves had neglected, altho of late 
years it has been carefully cultivated by critic 
after critic. As a matter of record, I may note 
here that I brought out in 1890 a second edition 
with a consideration of the developments of the 
French drama which had taken place during the 
intervening decade; and that in 1900 a third and 
final edition appeared, with another added chap- 
ter carrying on the story to the end of the century. 
The reviews which were printed in the French and 
British periodicals in the months that followed the 
first publication of the 'French Dramatists' occasion- 
ally expressed surprise that a New Yorker should 
take so Parisian a point of view. Francisque Sarcey, 
in the friendly notice which appeared in his weekly 
article in the Temps, declared that he would "re- 
proach the author with only one fault, altho this 
reproach might sound in his ear like praise: he is 
too Parisian." Perhaps this suggestion that I was 
sometimes too resolutely French in my criticism of 
French writers may be set off against a later asser- 
tion that I was sometimes too strenuously American 
in my criticism of British writers. A critic, who 
strives honestly to see men and things as they are, 
or, at least, as they appear to him in the dry light of 
disinterestedness, is likely now and again to be dis- 
concerting to hasty readers resentful of any sudden 
jar to their prejudices. 

When Sarcey said pleasant things about my 
'French Dramatists,' he was only returning the 
compliments I had paid him in the Nation on his 
'Comediens et Comediennes,' one of the most in- 



204 THESE MANY YEARS 

teresting and suggestive books of commingled bio- 
graphy and criticism which it has ever been my 
good fortune to read. In his letter acknowledging 
my review Sarcey admitted that my sympathetic 
appreciation of his work was more than usually 
grateful to him since his Parisian colleagues had 
not been at all cordial in their reception of his 
collection of histrionic studies. He ended his brief 
note by proffering "a cordial clasp of the hand." 
This encouraged me in August, 1881, to see if this 
metaphor might not be transformed into a fact. 

I had long been a regular reader of his substan- 
tial articles which appeared every Sunday after- 
noon in the Temps; and I admired intensely his 
abounding interest in all that related to the theater, 
and his marvellous understanding of the underlying 
principles of the twin arts of acting and play-writing. 
I had absorbed my first impressions of the range 
and power of the drama from Schlegel; but I had 
come to see that the ultimate value of the German's 
criticism was vitiated by his hostility not only to 
the classicist doctrines of the French, but to the 
French themselves, even to Moliere, the greatest 
of comic dramatists. In a man's life, as in the his- 
tory of the world, certain writings may have been 
of inestimable value and yet they may be super- 
seded in time by other writings which they have 
helped to make possible. Even tho they form the 
corner-stone of the first pier of the bridge of progress, 
the footpath for passengers hangs so high above 
them that there is no need now to climb down to 
the water's edge just to see how they look. While 



PARISIAN MEMORIES 205 

it was Schlegel who had opened my eyes, it was 
thru the spectacles of Sarcey that I was later to 
look at the stage. 

Sarcey was then settled in the house in the Rue 
Douai, which^his friend, Charles Gamier, the archi- 
tect of the Opera, had adapted for his use; and when 
I presented myself on the one day in the week when 
he was known to be accessible to all callers, I was 
at once shown up into the two-story studio which 
he had taken for his library, and which had for its 
most conspicuous pieces of furniture the desk at 
which the fecund journalist wrote his innumerable 
daily and weekly and monthly articles, and the leg- 
endary Red Divan which he had made almost as 
famous as the Red Waistcoat of The'ophile Gautier. 

When I recalled myself to his memory as his Amer- 
ican correspondent he gave me the cordial grasp of 
the hand for which I had come; and at once he made 
me feel at home. He was already corpulent, and 
he had a correspondingly broad face, girt with 
grizzled hair. Thru his ample spectacles I felt 
his gaze of shrewd benignity fixed upon me; and I 
was glad that he soon recognized in his young visitor 
one almost as keenly interested in the theater as he 
was himself. In the course of that summer and of 
other succeeding summers I had the pleasure of 
climbing his stairs half-a-dozen times; and I was 
always greeted with the cordial clasp of the hand 
and with the transfixing glance which seemed to 
"size me up," to use our expressive Americanism. 
Once he retained me to the midday breakfast to 
which he invited all the visitors who chanced to 



206 THESE MANY YEARS 

drop in that morning, — authors, fellow-critics, act- 
ors and actresses. Once, four or five years later, I 
heard him lecture, or rather talk a criticism of the 
book of the week, — it happened to be Maupassant's 
* Bel- Ami,' which he held to be a complete mis- 
representation of the facts of Parisian journalism. 
And on my last visit to his house, when I was tak- 
ing my leave, I told him that I was about to return 
to New York and asked if there was anything I 
could do for him on the far side of the Atlantic. 

"Nothing," he answered, standing at the top of 
the twisting staircase. "But yes! Talk about me 
as much as you can!" ("Mais, si! Parlez de moi 
beaucoup!") 

"That is what I am always doing," I replied. 
("C'est ce que jefais toujour s") And his genial laugh 
followed me down to the door. He had his little 
vanities — like the rest of us. And I have diligently 
obeyed his parting request. I have spoken about 
him incessantly, in gratitude for all I acquired 
from his work. 



I had specific occasion for gratitude as a result 
of my first visit to him in 1881. A week earlier, in 
the final days of July, I had been taken by a friend 
to the annual competition for prizes, by the 'prentice 
players of the Conservatory of Music and Declama- 
tion, and I had sat for several hours hearing scene 
after scene from dramatists ancient and modern, 
presented by aspiring young actors and actresses, 



PARISIAN MEMORIES 207 

of whom I now can recall by name only three, 
Galipaux, Gamier and Raphael Duflos. We were 
in the box assigned to the Ministry of Fine Arts; 
and in the center of the semicircle was the wider 
box wherein the judges sat enthroned, Ambroise 
Thomas, the composer of 'Mignon' and of 'Ham- 
let,' presiding, surrounded by Perrin, the manager 
of the Theatre Frangais, the younger Dumas, and 
Auguste Maquet, the partner of the elder Dumas 
in writing the 'Three Musketeers.' Three of the 
four professors of acting, Regnier, Delaunay and 
Worms, sat in a side-box; the fourth professor, 
Got, I failed to discover, — altho he must have been 
present. 

In that first interview with Sarcey I happened to 
mention that I had been present at this conservatory 
competition. And he promptly told me that the 
prizes were to be distributed the next day, and that, 
as I had been so much interested by the competition, 
I ought not to miss seeing the awards to the success- 
ful competitors. "And it will be unusually inter- 
esting to-morrow," he added. "Got is to be deco- 
rated. He is to receive the cross of the Legion of 
Honor." 

I responded that I should like nothing better 
than to be a spectator at this event, but that as an 
unknown stranger in a strange city, I had no chance 
of receiving a ticket. 

"But you can have mine," he declared at once. 
"I can't go myself. I never miss a reception at 
the French Academy and to-morrow Renan is to 
deliver an address." 



208 THESE MANY YEARS 

Thus assured that I was not depriving him of 
what to me would be a precious possession, I gladly 
accepted. And the next day at one I presented 
Sarcey's ticket at the door of the tiny theater of 
the Conservatory and was duly admitted. Then I 
found that I was privileged to be present at what 
was emphatically a historic occasion, for it was the 
first time that any actor was to be admitted to the 
Legion of Honor, while he was still in the active 
exercise of his profession. It is true that Regnier 
had been decorated, but only as a professor in 
the Conservatory and only after he retired from the 
stage. And in honor of the significant event, of the 
signal honor to be bestowed for the first time upon 
an actor who had not yet renounced his calling, 
the little hall was even more crowded than was cus- 
tomary, if such a suggestion is not inconceivable. 
The boxes blazed with the beauties of the Comedie- 
Frangaise, among whom I soon singled out Jeanne 
Samary, with her infectious laughter and her tip- 
tilted nose. The excitement of the gathering was 
contagious and I was conscious of sympathetic 
thrills of doubt and hope when the Under-Secretary 
of Fine Arts kept us all waiting, and when I was 
told that this was because the old soldiers who 
constitute the Council of the Legion of Honor were 
still hostile to the idea of sharing their distinction 
with a mere actor. 

At last, after a harassing delay, the Under- 
Secretary arrived and the tension was relaxed. The 
Prime Minister, Jules Ferry, had overruled the old 
fogies of the Council of the Legion of Honor. Then 



PARISIAN MEMORIES 209 

Ambroise Thomas awarded the prizes to the success- 
ful pupils whom I had seen competing; and yet 
this won but a languid attention from the audience, 
who had come for an event far more exciting than 
this annual festival, for a reward more spectacular 
and absolutely unprecedented. After an intermina- 
ble list had been read the Under-Secretary rose; 
and to the disappointment of all he began by be- 
stowing the unimportant insignia of the absurdly 
named Officer of Academy upon three or four of 
the professors of instrumental music in the Con- 
servatory, upon the instructor of the trombone for 
one, and upon the instructor of the double-bass for 
another. 

Finally the supreme moment arrived. The Under- 
Secretary paused and cleared his throat. Then he 
raised his voice: "A still higher recompense has been 
reserved for M. Got — " and he could go no further, 
so immediate was the interruption of tumultuous 
applause, during which Got rose to his feet from 
the group on the stage which surrounded the 
speaker. 

When there was once more comparative silence 
the Under-Secretary began again: "A still higher 
recompense has been reserved for M. Got, professor 
of declamation. He is made a Knight of the Legion 
of Honor. It is as professor in the Conservatory 
that M. Got obtains this high recompense for his 
services." 

Here the Under-Secretary hesitated for a moment. 
The applause died down instantly. A sudden chill 
pervaded the atmosphere of the theater. The 



210 THESE MANY YEARS 

whole audience wanted to see the cross bestowed on 
Got as a comedian and not on Got as a professor. 

But the Under-Secretary of the Fine Arts was as 
sensitive to this drop in the temperature as I was; 
and he at once rose to the occasion. "Neverthe- 
less," he went on, raising his voice only a little, but 
spacing his words more carefully, "nevertheless, 
the Government in decorating the professor of the 
Conservatory has not been able to forget that it is 
honoring also the dean of the Comedie-Frangaise !" 

Then again the applause thundered forth led by 
Coquelin and by Delaunay. The fair occupants 
of the boxes stood up and clapped their hands. 
Everybody was happy at last, for the almost un- 
hoped-for had come to pass. Got advanced to the 
Under-Secretary, who took the red ribbon from his 
own buttonhole and fastened it in Got's. Then he 
gave Got the accolade, — that is, he kissed him. 
And the triumphant ceremony was complete, — 
excepting only that Delaunay also embraced Got 
as soon as his comrade took his seat again by the 
side of his fellow-professors. 

As soon as I could get out of the throng, I took 
a cab straight to the Theatre Frangais, for I felt 
sure that if Got was to appear that evening his 
reception would be most cordial. By good luck 
I was able to get a good seat; and I had the delight 
of being present at a marvellously brilliant per- 
formance of the most brilliant of Moliere's comedies, 
the 'Femmes Savantes.' Altho it was early in 
August and not a few of the most important actors 
were away on vacation, they returned loyally to 



PARISIAN MEMORIES 211 

support their leader. Got himself was Tressotin, 
of course, Delaunay was Clitandre, Thiron was 
Chrysale, and Coquelin resumed for once the little 
part of Vadius, who appears only in a single scene. 
Madeleine Brohan was Philaminthe, Baretta was 
Henriette, Favart was Arsinoe, Jouassain was Belise, 
and Dinah-Felix (the sister of Rachel) was Martine. 
I doubt if so many of the Associates had been seen 
together in a single play of Moliere's since a time 
whereof the memory of man runneth not to the con- 
trary, as the old law-phrase puts it. 

I can recall now without effort the perfect compre- 
hension of what comedy can be and ought to be 
displayed by Got and Coquelin in the disputation 
of the two pedants — that most humorous episode 
which is the comic analog of the tragic quarrel of 
Brutus and Cassius. I thought Got's rendering 
of the self-satisfied and self-seeking Tressotin mas- 
terly, altho he was a little hard at times, and a little 
rigid, as was his wont. Coquelin was subtler and 
suppler in Vadius; and to my astonishment he was 
able to quench the fire of his glance and to keep his 
gaze down to a dead, leaden level, never allowing 
a chance flash of his eyes to suggest that he was 
other than the character he was assuming. The 
accomplishment of this feat is credited also to Gar- 
rick; but till I saw Coquelin achieve it I had thought 
it impossible. And I was not surprised when I 
found Austin Dobson likening Garrick to Coquelin 
"with his mercurial presence and the magnetism 
of his impetuous ubiquity." 



212 THESE MANY YEARS 



VI 

In the course of my summer visits to Paris I 
met Jules Claretie, who had succeeded Perrin as 
manager of the Theatre Frangais; Frangois Coppee, 
then the librarian of the Comedie-Frangaise; and 
Georges Monval, the custodian of its archives and the 
compiler of an invaluable 'Chronologie Molieresque.' 
Monval was then editing the monthly Molieriste, 
a review which he issued for ten years, and which 
is a storehouse of useful material for lovers of 
Moliere. To the number of the Molieriste for 
August, 1881, 1 contributed a little paper on 'Moliere 
en Amerique,' my sole effort to compose in a tongue 
other than my own; and my vanity was again most 
agreeably titillated when the Temps found my 
essay amusing enough to fill one of its broad columns. 

At the exposition of 1878 I had been greatly 
attracted by a special exhibition illustrating the 
history of the theater in France prepared under 
the direction of a distinguished committee of ex- 
perts. The chief feature of this exhibition was a 
series of models of theaters and of the sets needed 
for a number of early French pieces. When I 
returned to Paris in 1881, I found that the whole 
collection had been deposited in the library of the 
Opera, of which Charles Nuitter was then the libra- 
rian. By assiduous and insidious appeals Nuitter 
had been able to obtain for the library the wing 
of the new Opera which had been intended to serve 
as the private reception-rooms of the deposed and 



PARISIAN MEMORIES 213 

departed Emperor and Empress. Nuitter most 
kindly made me at home in the library of the Opera, 
and expounded the treasures he was guarding. The 
more I studied the series of models, representing 
sets in the successive epochs of the French stage, 
the more illuminative I found them. An old play 
seemed to start to new life when I was thus enabled 
to visualize its original performance. 

I found myself wishing that it might be possible 
to do for the history of the English drama what had 
been done for the history of the French drama. 
Thirty years later this wish was realized when a 
dramatic museum was established at Columbia 
University to contain a historic sequence of models 
carefully chosen to make plain the differences in 
size and shape between the several theaters which 
have followed each other in the various countries 
possessing a living drama of their own. The scope 
of the collection now being gathered in New York 
is even broader than that begun in Paris long ago; 
and the American specimens have been drawn from 
a wider field, since the French restricted their efforts 
to their own drama. Yet three or four of the most 
impressive and most useful models in the collection 
of Columbia University are copies of those preserved 
at the Opera in Paris. 



CHAPTER X 
CONCERNING CLUBS 



ONE June evening in 1878, while I was stroll- 
ing in the lobby of the Lyceum Theater, in 
London, during an intermission of 'Vander- 
decken,' in which Henry Irving was appearing as the 
Flying Dutchman, Laurence Hutton came up to me 
and introduced himself; and thus began one of the 
most satisfactory friendships of my life. For friend- 
ship Hutton had a special gift. He was companion- 
able, kindly, cheerful, unpretending; and he was 
greatly liked by all sorts and conditions of men. He 
was fond of books and familiar with writers of books. 
His interest was rather in the memorabilia of author- 
ship than in the criticism of literature ; and he was a 
specialist in the topography of the history of English 
literature, as he proved in his 'Literary Landmarks 
of London.' 

His interest in the theater and in stage-history 
was as keen as mine; and he introduced himself 
to me because I had written to him several years 
earlier, expressing my hope that he would make a 
book out of the rambling reminiscences of plays 
and players which he was then contributing to an 
evening paper. He was one of the most intimate 
friends of Edwin Booth and of Lawrence Barrett, 
and when we agreed to edit in conjunction a series 

214 



CONCERNING CLUBS 215 

of five volumes on the ' Actors and Actresses of Great 
Britain and the United States from the Time of 
David Garrick to the Present Time/ he persuaded 
Booth to undertake his only contribution to litera- 
ture, a pair of racy and succulent papers on his 
father, Junius Brutus Booth, and on his father's 
greater rival, Edmund Kean. 

Hutton and I also collaborated in editing John 
Bernard's 'Retrospections of America.' In reading 
Bernard's 'Retrospections of the Stage,' edited by 
his son, Bayle Bernard (the playwright who had first 
attempted a dramatization of 'Rip Van Winkle'), I 
noted that the actor had left a record of his career 
on the American stage; and I had written to Mrs. 
Bayle Bernard to inquire if these later reminiscences 
were in shape for publication. She had sent me 
the manuscript, and we found it well worth printing, 
more particularly because of a careful account of 
one of the English comedian's meetings with George 
Washington. We provided an introduction and 
notes; and we procured its publication first in a 
magazine and then as a book. 

Hutton was a graceful writer in style and a very 
forcible writer in penmanship. He used a fat pen, 
and his calligraphy was bold and black. I once saw 
a postman about to cross the street to my house, 
and holding in his hand a letter; and even at that 
distance I made sure that it was from Hutton. 
Thomas Bailey Aldrich once complained to me that 
a letter of his had not been promptly answered by 
Hutton, adding: "But I suppose Laurence hasn't 
yet laid in his winter ink !" 



216 THESE MANY YEARS 

Hutton was quite unpretending, and he had a 
sufficient sense of humor to take a joke on himself 
and to tell it with appreciation of the point which 
transfixed him. As a very young man he had filled 
for a little while a place in a wholesale produce office, 
which bought from the market-gardeners and sold 
to the grocers. As his customers were plain people 
he always took off his gloves at least two blocks 
before he reached the store. One day a farmer 
came in and greeted him with a question about a 
rival commission house. Hutton explained that 
they were competitors, and that, therefore, he knew 
little about them, but that, so far as he knew, they 
were gentlemen. 

" That's just what I thought," replied the plain- 
spoken farmer. "I ain't no gentleman myself and 
I don't propose to do business with no gentlemen. 
I'll sell my goods to you!" 

Another anecdote he used to tell against himself 
bore on his unfortunate inability to make his tongue 
obey his brain, a failing which led him on more than 
one occasion to make infelicitous slips. He was a 
friend of Helen Hunt, the author of 'Ramona' and 
of the Saxe Holm stories; and he went to call on 
her when she visited New York for the first time 
after her second marriage. All the way to pay his 
visit he kept saying to himself: "I must remember 
to call her Mrs. Jackson, Mrs. Jackson, Mrs. Jack- 
son." But when she had shaken hands with him she 
introduced the gentleman standing by her side: 
"My husband." And Hutton unhesitatingly re- 
marked: "Very glad to meet you, Mr. Hunt!" 



CONCERNING CLUBS 217 

During the serial publication of the life of Lincoln 
by John Hay and J. G. Nicolay, Hutton stayed a 
day or two at a hotel in Leamington; and there, in 
the smoking-room, one evening he fell into conver- 
sation with a rural dean, who, as soon as he had 
discovered that his fellow-guest was an American, 
began to talk about Lincoln. "I've been readin' 
those articles about Lincoln in that magazine of 
yours, very interestin', very interestin', indeed. 
Have you read them?" Hutton admitted their 
perusal. "Then perhaps you will agree with me," 
returned the English clergyman; "I'm inclined to 
believe that that man Lincoln must have been the 
most remarkable nigger that ever lived. Don't 
you think so?" And altho Hutton spent the better 
part of the evening in trying to persuade his friendly 
companion that the author of the Gettysburg address 
had been born free and white, his explanations failed 
to carry conviction. When Hutton told me this, 
I was moved to cap it with a story told by my father 
about another English clergyman who maintained 
that our Civil War was absurd. "You have only 
to look at a map and see how narrow the isthmus 
is that unites them to see that God didn't mean 
North and South America to be under the same 
government." Taken together these two anecdotes 
tend to confirm Charles Dudley Warner's assertion 
that there must be schools in England where they 
teach ignorance of America. 

Once when Hutton and I returned to America 
on the same boat we had for a fellow-passenger a 
blatant man who made his abhorrent personality 



218 THESE MANY YEARS 

obtrusively offensive in the smoking-room. He 
raised his raucous voice in frequent self -laudation; 
he gave himself out as a Scotsman, a sailor, a great 
traveller, a seer of strange sights. After an unusually 
protracted revelation of his peculiarities, this per- 
son left the smoking-room one afternoon banging the 
door after him, and a hush fell upon the crowd. 
Hutton waited a moment, and then addressing me, 
but raising his voice a little so that it carried, he 
remarked: "I have no desire to say anything against 
the gentleman who has just left us — but he is not 
a Scotchman as he says he is. He says JZdinburg" 
Whereupon a quiet little man in a far corner looked 
up from his game of patience and contributed this: 
"He ain't no sailor, neither. He spits to wind- 
ward!" And then silence again enveloped us. 

It was early in the eighties that the Tile Club was 
founded by a group of illustrators. It held its 
meetings in a back building in Tenth Street — the 
same house where Hopkinson Smith laid the scene 
of 'Colonel Carter of Carters ville.' Elihu Vedder, 
altho a resident of Rome, had been elected to the 
Tile Club; but, as it happened, he was not able to 
be present at any of its gatherings until he came to 
one which Hutton attended as the guest of Stan- 
ford White. When Vedder entered the outer room, 
it chanced that Hutton and White and Arthur B. 
Frost were seated side by side on a settee; and all 
three of them were then tall men, with reddish hair 
and full, drooping, reddish mustaches. Now, Vedder 
was at that time also a tall man with reddish hair 
and a full, drooping, reddish mustache. When he 



CONCERNING CLUBS 219 

came in, he paused in front of the settee on which 
were sitting the three men who looked more or less 
like each other and like him. He knew White and 
Hutton very well, but Frost he did not know. He 
glanced at them for a moment and they returned 
his gaze in silence. Then he went to the mantel- 
piece and took down a little mirror, and turned back 
to the settee. He solemnly compared his own face 
in the looking-glass, first with White's, then with 
Frost's and finally with Hutton's. This done to 
his satisfaction, he stepped up to Frost and held out 
his hand saying, "Here's another chimpanzee to 
make up your quartet." 

II 

In 1885, Hutton and I joined forces with half-a- 
dozen others equally interested in the history of 
the American stage and established the Dunlap 
Society to print books relating to the theater in the 
United States. We named our book club after 
William Dunlap, the earliest of our professional 
playwrights. I was elected secretary, and with the 
loyal assistance of Hutton I got out a dozen volumes 
in the course of the next half-dozen years. I pro- 
vided introductions for two plays, Dunlap's e Andre' 
and Burk's 'Battle of Bunker Hill'; and Hutton 
made two collections of poetic addresses delivered 
in American theaters in the course of the preceding 
century. After a trance of several years the Dun- 
lap Society was revived in 1900 with Douglas Taylor 
as president; and it issued a second series of publica- 



220 THESE MANY YEARS 

tions. Then it entered on another stage of sus- 
pended animation until 1914, when it was again 
resuscitated and I was elected president with the 
definite understanding that the position was to be 
absolutely honorary. 

With Hutton again I took part in founding another 
organization. There was then in New York no dis- 
tinctively literary club, altho many of the older 
authors were members of the Century Association. 
It occurred to Charles de Kay that it might be possi- 
ble to gather together the men of letters residing in 
or near New York; and on a call from him seven of 
us met on October 21, 1882, at the house of his 
brother-in-law, Richard Watson Gilder — a very 
picturesque residence in Fifteenth Street just east 
of Union Square, a dwelling transmogrified from a 
commodious stable. Then and there we seven — 
De Kay, Gilder, Edward Eggleston, Noah Brooks, 
Edmund Clarence Stedman, Hutton and I — agreed 
to organize the Authors Club. At a second meeting, 
held a week later at Stedman's, other men of letters 
were present by invitation; and a committee was 
appointed to draft a constitution. And at a third 
meeting, held at Hutton's, this constitution was for- 
mally accepted. 

It was only by the exercise of remarkable prevision 
that the early members were able to avert immediate 
discord and imminent disruption, as there were at 
least two of the twenty-five organizing members who 
aspired to the signal honor of being the first president 
of the new club. This difficulty was evaded by the 
simple device of not having a president and of 



CONCERNING CLUBS 221 

confiding the government of the association to an ex- 
ecutive council which was to elect its own chairman. 

For the first year or two the Authors Club held its 
meetings here and there, sometimes at the houses of 
different members and sometimes at restaurants. 
After a while it accepted the hospitality of the Tile 
Club; and a year or two later it engaged quarters 
of its own. It elected Matthew Arnold as its first 
honorary member; and to him, when he came to 
America, in 1883, to lecture, it gave its first reception. 

From its earliest meetings the Authors Club 
justified the hopes of its founders; and for the first 
time in the history of New York the members of 
the writing craft were able to get acquainted with 
each other. We soon discovered that we were far 
more in number than any of us had supposed; and 
authors who survived their earlier fame were called 
back to mingle with their younger successors. Once 
or twice the shy and elusive Herman Melville dropped 
in for an hour or two. Indeed, it was one of the 
chief advantages of the new club that it permitted 
the conscripts of authorship to associate with the 
veterans of the calling. Not a few of the men of 
letters domiciled in other parts of the country ac- 
cepted non-resident membership and intermittently 
took part in our gatherings. 

Of course, we were prone to talk shop at our fort- 
nightly reunions, and to break into little groups to 
exchange experiences. Authors and editors met in- 
formally as fellow-members and they welcomed now 
and again the publishers, even making them members 
when they happened to have written a book or two. 



%%% THESE MANY YEARS 

Two of the anecdotes told to me at one or another 
of these earlier gatherings recur to me now as I am 
jotting down these recollections. Who it was that 
imparted the first of them I do not now remember, 
tho the story itself has clung to my memory. It 
related to the earlier days of Scribner's Monthly 
and to Charles Kingsley's brief stay in New York. 
To meet the British visitor Dr. J. G. Holland in- 
vited every one who had ever contributed to Scrib- 
ner's. One of these invitations went to an elderly 
maiden lady in a remote New England village, a few 
of her unpretending lyrics having been printed 
once upon a time in the pages of the magazine. 
She held it a duty to accept the editorial command; 
and she made her first trip to the metropolis. Of 
course, she knew no one of those who gathered to 
do honor to Kingsley; and she sat by herself in a 
modest corner. There she was spied by Roswell 
Smith, the kindly publisher of the magazine, and he 
had pity on her solitude amid the throng. He intro- 
duced himself and told her who the different guests 
were, delighting her by enabling her to see in the 
flesh the writers she had met before only in print. 
Finally he asked her to go with him into the dining- 
room for a croquette or an ice cream. She hesitated 
for a moment and then confessed frankly: "I'd like 
to, but I don't know that I ought. You see, I have 
a ticket for the entertainment, but I'm not sure 
whether it includes refreshments." 

The other tale was told me by S. S. Conant, only 
a few weeks before he vanished absolutely from off 
the face of the earth without leaving any clue; and 



CONCERNING CLUBS 223 

to this day no light has ever been thrown on the 
mystery of his disappearance. At the time of this 
last talk with him he was the managing editor of 
Harper's Weekly and he had only recently received 
from E. A. Abbey a double-page drawing depicting 
the expulsion of the Quakers from Massachusetts. 
Conant had at once written to Whittier, asking him 
for a poem to accompany the picture; and the Quaker 
had declined, explaining that he had already treated 
the theme and did not feel that he could add anything 
to what he had once said. But Conant was not dis- 
couraged, and when the drawing was engraved on 
wood he sent Whittier a proof of the cut, in the 
hope that the poet might be moved to reconsider 
his refusal. Within a week his faith was justified, 
and he received a pair of sonnets which the sight 
of Abbey's beautiful print had evoked. Accompany- 
ing them was a letter in which the simple-minded 
poet requested two hundred dollars in payment, 
adding that "if thee cannot give so much, thee will 
please return them to me, as I can get that sum 
nearer home," — meaning, no doubt, from the 
Atlantic. The editor promptly put the sonnets in 
type and sent a proof to Whittier with a check for 
the desired amount. When the proof was returned, 
Conant found that Whittier had intercalated a third 
sonnet between the other two. 

"Did you send him another hundred dollars?" I 
inquired, being always anxious that the laborer 
should reap his reward. 

"No," responded Conant, smiling. "I thought 
he could ask for it, if he expected it." 



224 THESE MANY YEARS 



III 

One immediate result of the founding of the 
Authors Club and of the opportunity it afforded us 
to rub elbows and to develop a solidarity among 
the men of letters in New York, and in its immedi- 
ate vicinity, was the organization of the American 
Copyright League — which came to be known later 
as the Authors League in contradistinction to a 
corresponding League soon to be formed by the 
publishers. The original members of the Copy- 
right League were all members of the Authors Club ; 
and I believe that it was at the meetings of the Club 
that the establishment of the League was first 
broached. 

Many efforts had been made in the past to arouse 
public opinion in behalf of foreign writers, who were 
almost wholly without any protection under our 
laws; but these efforts had been unavailing. The 
situation of our literature under these circumstances 
was increasingly unsatisfactory. Not only were we 
taking without payment the writings of British and 
French and German men of letters, but our own men 
of letters had to vend their wares in competition 
with these stolen goods — which was most dis- 
couraging to the riper development of the American 
branch of English literature and also most unsettling 
to the book-trade, upon which the expansion of 
literature is nowadays necessarily dependent. And 
the American authors had another grievous disability, 
since it was unfair to expect that foreign nations 



CONCERNING CLUBS 225 

would be generous enough to extend the full protec- 
tion of their legislation to Americans so long as we 
refused any protection to their own writers. 

The first meeting of the American Copyright 
League was held at my house, 121 East 18th Street, 
on April 16, 1883. The first of the authors to 
arrive was Henry James, whom I had then the 
pleasure of meeting for the first time. The second 
meeting took place a little later at Hutton's; and 
in a few weeks we had collected adherents all over 
the country. We organized for a long campaign, 
resolved not to quit until we had accomplished our 
purpose; in fact, as a matter of record it may be 
set down here that it was more than eight years 
before we could rejoice over the passage of the first 
act recognizing the obligation of the American 
people toward the foreign men of letters who were 
amusing and enlightening us. Our ultimate victory 
was due largely to the zeal and the tact of our 
successive secretaries, George Parsons Lathrop, 
Henry Loomis Nelson, and Robert Underwood John- 
son. It was due also to the invaluable assistance of 
our allies among publishers. 

We chose a strong and energetic executive com- 
mittee, and James Russell Lowell accepted the 
presidency, contributing the quatrain which we 
adopted as our motto: 



In vain we call old notions fudge, 

And bend our conscience to our dealing; 

The ten commandments will not budge 
And stealing will continue stealing. 



226 THESE MANY YEARS 

Hutton and I were both members of the executive 
committee; and I was soon made chairman of a 
subcommittee on publicity. For several months 
I had to provide for a syndicate of friendly news- 
papers a daily paragraph, calculated to arouse the in- 
terest of the unthinking public in our cause. These 
paragraphs were extracted from the addresses and 
the articles and the letters of our supporters; and 
they tended to arouse a current of interest in our 
behalf among those who had hitherto paid no atten- 
tion to the subject. 

It was the experience gained in this agitation for 
international copyright which first called my atten- 
tion to the fact that in advocacy of any movement 
in advance there is no need to waste time in contro- 
versy with its antagonists. A determined opponent 
who has once begun to argue on his own side can 
never be converted. Of course, his arguments must 
be met and answered, but with no hope of affecting 
his views; and this response must be as brief as may 
be. It is to the public at large that all argument 
must be addressed — the public which may be 
assumed to know nothing at all about the facts of 
the case and to care less. This immense majority 
is never hostile; it is only totally ignorant of the 
situation and profoundly uninterested. And since 
the public is without knowledge, argument is not 
needed so much as information. Once put the aver- 
age man in possession of the facts, and these facts 
speak for themselves; they will convert him, if he 
will only pause long enough to take them in. He 
pays little attention to protracted discussion be- 



CONCERNING CLUBS 227 

tween those in favor of a reform and those opposed 
to it; and he is inclined to smile at their vehemence. 
But catch him off his guard and appeal to his com- 
mon sense by an understatement of the situation and 
he soon sees for himself the necessity of the action 
urged. In fact, if the situation can be understated 
so moderately that he is tempted to restate it him- 
self more effectively, then he is already won over, 
and he can be relied on to go forth and make con- 
verts to the cause he has unwittingly made his own. 
As chairman of the committee on publicity I 
wrote several appeals to the average man, always 
avoiding vehemence and violence and always striv- 
ing to supply information which the mind of the 
average man could readily apprehend and upon 
which it could react. Three of these contributions 
of mine may be mentioned here. The last of them 
was a perfectly colorless account of the slow evolu- 
tions of copyright, national and international, from 
the first granting by Venice, shortly after the inven- 
tion of printing, of an exclusive privilege to one of 
its citizens, protecting for seven years his edition 
of Cicero's letters, a protection which could not 
extend beyond the boundaries of the Venetian repub- 
lic. In the legal aspects of this historical sketch, I 
was aided by Professor Monroe Smith, my colleague 
on the executive committee, who printed my paper 
in the Political Science Quarterly, of which he was 
the editor. When it appeared I sent it to Theodore 
Roosevelt, also a member of the League, and he gave 
it at once to Thomas B. Reed, then Speaker of the 
House of Representatives. Reed was an intimate 



228 THESE MANY YEARS 

friend of Roosevelt and of Henry Cabot Lodge and 
was in the habit of chaffing them about their inter- 
est in the international copyright, which he care- 
lessly dismissed as a fad of the mugwumps. And 
it was upon Reed's good-will that we had to depend 
for the granting of a day, at the close of the session 
of 1891, for the passage of our bill in the House, it 
having already passed the Senate. My paper showed 
that the United States then lagged far behind all 
the other countries of the world, very far behind the 
Latin-American republics, for example; and my 
sole suggestion at the end was that the time had 
come when we ought to resume our former position 
at the head of the procession of nations. This 
unadorned statement of our position converted Reed, 
for the next morning he told Roosevelt that we 
could have a day for our bill whenever we wanted it. 
The act was passed; and on the 1st of July, 1891, we 
took our first step in advance. In the years that 
have followed, the ground then won has been re- 
tained and even extended by successive amendments 
to the law. 

Two of the other articles I wrote were revised 
and issued as pamphlets by the League, 'Cheap 
Books and Good Books' in 1888, and 'American 
Authors and British Pirates' in 1889. The first 
of these was an analysis of the plea put forward 
by our opponents that the granting of international 
copyright would deprive the reading public of the 
United States of cheap books. I had no difficulty 
in showing that the only books made cheaper by 
the absence of international copyright were con- 



CONCERNING CLUBS 229 

temporary British novels, forced into an artificial 
circulation by half-a-dozen rival reprinters, and I 
pointed out that this artificial stimulation of a de- 
mand for the poorer sort of British fiction was not 
a good thing in itself. I collected illustrations to 
show that in foreign countries, especially in France 
and in Germany, where there was no artificially 
created plethora of imported fiction, the demand for 
cheap books was met by various series of standard 
works of a value approved by time, and to be pro- 
cured at a price even lower than that for which the 
borrowed British novels were to be had in the United 
States. I ventured the prediction that, when the 
flood of imported and inferior fiction should be cut 
off, American publishers would gladly meet the 
demand for cheap books, supplying it with writings 
of a more enduring worth. And now that we have 
had international copyright for a quarter of a cen- 
tury and that the practice of piracy has been given 
up, it is a satisfaction to see that this prophecy 
has been fulfilled and that the cheapest books are 
now the books best worth having. 

I was moved to prepare the other pamphlet on 
'American Authors and British Pirates' by my 
disgust at the assertion often made by our own sup- 
porters that the book-piracy was our national sin, 
with the implication that it was a sin from which 
other peoples were free. This assertion also ap- 
peared frequently in the British papers, our kin 
across the sea — a little more than kin and less 
than kind — being so acutely conscious of the beam 
in our eye that they were serenely unconscious of 



230 THESE MANY YEARS 

the mote in their own. It is a fact, of course, that 
far more British books were pirated in America than 
American books in England; but this was largely 
because there were far more British books than there 
were American. I found it easy enough to show that 
several London publishers made a practice of pirat- 
ing every American book likely to appeal to their 
constituency — 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' 'Ben Hur,' 
Miss Alcott's juvenile tales and the varied writings 
of our laughing philosophers, Artemus Ward, Josh 
Billings, and Mark Twain. And altho there was 
less piracy in England, what there was had offensive 
features rarely observable in American reprints of 
British books, for the British pirates were sometimes 
moved to mutilate their spoil in an effort to accom- 
modate it to insular taste. 

It is only fair, however, to note that the British 
law was a little better than ours, since it did afford 
occasional protection to certain American writers; 
that is to say, if one of our better-known men of 
letters could arrange for simultaneous publication 
in London and in New York, and if he could manage 
to be under the British flag on the day of issue, in 
Canada or in Bermuda, then he was secure from 
piracy in the British Empire. But, of course, this 
device, besides being expensive and troublesome, 
protected only the writer of recognized popularity 
who could make sure of simultaneous publication; 
and it left without any protection an author's first 
successful book — 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' for example, 
or the 'Innocents Abroad.' 

Yet because it did protect the writer of ascer- 



CONCERNING CLUBS 231 

tained position, Mark Twain was perfectly satis- 
fied with it; and when my paper on 'American 
Authors and British Pirates' originally appeared 
in the New Princeton Review, Mark fell foul of it at 
once in a very characteristic and very amusing letter. 
In my rejoinder I admitted that, altho the British 
law protected him with his international fame, it 
left the novice absolutely without any control over 
his own work. In this reply I was studiously 
courteous, refraining from any retort in kind to 
Mark's humorous personalities. Nevertheless Mark 
took offense and for a year or two he seemed to 
avoid me. Like most humorists, he was inclined 
to take himself seriously and to be more or less 
deficient in the negative sense-of -humor which often 
fails to accompany the more positive humor. 

IV 

For Scribner's Monthly I had prepared a paper 
on the 'Actors and Actresses of New York,' for 
which most of the illustrations were drawn by E. A. 
Abbey, with whom I soon formed a friendship. 
With his customary kindness he offered to design a 
book-plate for me, if I could supply an idea for his 
pictorial treatment. I suggested that as I was 
an American interested in the drama he might 
portray an Indian gazing at a Greek comic mask. 
Abbey accepted this at once as a promising motive. 
"But where can I get a Greek mask?" he inquired. 
I lifted up my cuff and showed him one of a pair of 
gold sleeve-buttons, in the shape of a comic and 



232 THESE MANY YEARS 

a tragic mask — adornments which I had bought 
from a Parisian jeweler three days after the battle 
of Sedan. A few days later when he handed me his 
charming design, I inquired in my turn: "But where 
did you get your Indian?" And he answered: "I 
posed an Irishman for that. You know, Irishmen 
make thundering good Indians." Then he demanded 
an appropriate motto to encircle his drawing; and I 
took down my Moliere, rinding at last in the ' Critique 
de l'Ecole des Femmes' a line which seemed like a 
prophetic anticipation of the design: "What do 
you think of this comedy?" ("Que pensez-vous de 
cette comedie?") 

Either thru Abbey or thru Hutton I got acquainted 
about this time with Francis D. Millet and with 
Lawrence Barrett; and we four came in time to 
discuss the starting of an informal club, to consist 
of practitioners of the allied arts, writers, painters, 
actors, who could dine or sup or lunch together 
intermittently, in New York in the winter, and in 
London in the summer, when we might happen to 
meet on the far side of the Atlantic. To make a 
start, I invited Abbey, Barrett, Hutton, Millet and 
W. M. Laffan to dine with me at the Florence 
House, then on the corner of Fourth Avenue and 
18th Street. This was on April 3, 1882; and we 
then and there decided to call ourselves The Kins- 
men. 

It was not until a year later that we met again at 
dinner (in March, 1883) at Hutton's, when we wel- 
comed to our ranks Bunner and James R. Osgood, 
Vedder and Mark Twain. In the summer of 1883, 



CONCERNING CLUBS 233 

we had a third meeting in London, at which we ad- 
mitted George H. Boughton and Clarence King, and 
also half-a-dozen of our British friends, Andrew 
Lang and Austin Dobson, Comyns Carr and Edmund 
Gosse, Alfred Parsons and Linley Sambourne; and 
for the bill-of-fare Abbey sketched a plate repre- 
senting Brother Jonathan shaking hands with John 
Bull. (One of our later London bills-of-fare, I 
may here note, had for its head-piece a composite 
pen-and-ink sketch by Abbey, Boughton, Parsons 
and Sambourne.) In the fall of that year another 
gathering took place at the Shakspere Inn at Strat- 
ford; and then William Black was adjoined to us; 
and in New York a month later we had a luncheon 
to admit Joseph Jefferson and Henry Irving, Richard 
Watson Gilder and George Parsons Lathrop. There- 
after, sometimes in London and sometimes in New 
York, we met at irregular intervals, slowly swelling 
our American membership by the admission of Wil- 
liam Dean Howells, R. Swain Gifford, John Ames 
Mitchell, Charles Dudley Warner, and Thomas 
Bailey Aldrich. Unfortunately there was an un- 
pleasant misunderstanding in connection with a 
New York dinner in 1887; and as a result of this 
the American branch of The Kinsmen never had an- 
other meeting. 

There was no dissolution, but its members lost 
their interest in the club and it simply ceased to be. 
When the American members chanced to be in Lon- 
don they foregathered with the British members; 
and to this day the British branch is still flourishing 
after an existence of more than thirty years. It 



234 THESE MANY YEARS 

recognizes its American origin by making the Ameri- 
can Ambassador an ex-officio member, and by send- 
ing over its signed bills-of-fare to the sole sur- 
vivor of its six founders. It is pleasant for that 
survivor here to express his belief that our modest 
international organization may have done its share 
in cultivating a better understanding between the 
exponents of the kindred arts in the two branches 
of the English-speaking peoples. No more con- 
genial body of men ever came together in London 
or in New York; and the memory of our meetings 
is a permanent possession. 

Especially pleasant to me is the fact that the 
founding of The Kinsmen consolidated my friend- 
ship with Frank Millet, a man of varied accomplish- 
ments and of unfailing attractiveness. A drummer 
boy in the Civil War, a correspondent decorated by 
the Czar for bravery under fire, a writer of short- 
stories of weird ingenuity (witness 'Yatil' and the 
'Fourth Waits'), a painter of high ambition, an 
administrator of admirable sagacity, he was always 
simple, unaffected, friendly, and companionable. Of 
him it could truly be said that "none knew him but 
to love him, none named him but to praise." He 
had solidity of character, cheerfulness and courage; 
and when his friends first had news of the disaster 
of the Titanic they never doubted that so long as 
there was one woman or one child in danger, Frank 
Millet would go down with the ship. 

His immense experience in all parts of the world, 
his unflagging interest in life, his felicity of speech, 
made him welcome in any circle. Altho he was in 



CONCERNING CLUBS 235 

no way a professed wit, his conversation was a con- 
stant delight; and yet when I try to recapture some 
stray fragments of it I find that all that I can clutch 
is only one insignificant specimen. And I am not 
sure that the amusing gibe I am about to quote was 
of his own invention. After he had been elected an 
associate of the Royal Academy of Art in London, 
being already a full member of the National Academy 
of Design in New York, I congratulated him on 
having two more letters to tag after his name. 

He laughed his contagious laugh and answered: 
"Don't you know the real meaning of those mystic 
letters? N.A. stands for No Artist; A.N. A. stands 
for Almost No Artist; and P.N. A. is Probably No 
Artist. So R.A. means 'Retched Artist; A.R.A. 
means Awfully 'Retched Artist; and P.R.A. is Per- 
fectly 'Retched Artist." 



Another club which, like The Kinsmen of New 
York, has gone out of existence, but which for nearly 
ten years had a recognized position, was the Nine- 
teenth Century Club, founded in the early eighties 
by Courtlandt Palmer on the model of the Round 
Table, over which Thomas Wentworth Higginson 
then presided in Boston. In its turn it served as 
the model of the still-surviving Contemporary Club 
of Philadelphia, and the Twentieth Century Club of 
Chicago. For the first years of its existence, and, 
in fact, as long as its founder lived, it met in his 
spacious house in Gramercy Park, 117 East 21st 



236 THESE MANY YEARS 

Street. There was either an "orator of the day," 
whose position was combated by two or three other 
speakers, or there was a debate between two repre- 
sentations of opposing views upon some question of 
immediate interest. I find that I have preserved 
Courtlandt Palmer's note, informing me that Julian 
Hawthorne would read a paper on the 'Novel,' 
on the evening of March 20, 1883, and that he 
hoped I would say a few words of comment upon it. 
I accepted the invitation; and I managed to say 
the few words without disclosing unduly the trepida- 
tion caused by the unwonted effort to talk on my 
feet. 

A month later Oliver Wendell Holmes came on 
from Boston to deliver an address on Emerson, 
which he incorporated later in his biography for the 
'American Men of Letters' series. His commingled 
humor and good humor, his sparrow-like chirpiness, 
if the phrase is not disrespectful, impressed me as 
not altogether congruous with his serious considera- 
tion of our most stimulating philosopher. In the 
course of the next two or three years I heard another 
philosopher, President McCosh of Princeton, join 
issue with President Eliot of Harvard over the elec- 
tive system adopted in New England and rejected 
in New Jersey. Dr. Eliot opened the debate, stating 
his case and answering in advance the objections 
which might be urged against it; and Dr. McCosh 
followed him, simply restating these objections with- 
out attention to the answers which his opponent had 
already made. Dr. Eliot summed up, reiterating 
his position and again demolishing the objections. 



CONCERNING CLUBS 237 

Then Dr. McCosh arose unexpectedly to express his 
hope that the debate might be published, evidently 
wholly unaware that, whatever might be the merits 
of the question itself, there could be no doubt as 
to the merits of the debate — a most remarkable 
exhibition of innocent complacency. 

The Nineteenth Century Club had a president 
and also a dozen or a score of vice-presidents, of 
whom I soon became one. Its first secretary was 
George W. Wickersham (afterward attorney-gen- 
eral of the United States) ; and its second secretary 
was William Travers Jerome (afterward district 
attorney of New York City). When Courtlandt 
Palmer died he was succeeded as president by Daniel 
Greenleaf Thompson; and after his death, I became 
the third president of the club, holding the position 
for two years. During Thompson's presidency and 
during mine, the meetings were held in hired halls, 
at first in the spacious galleries of the American 
Artists Association, and later in the concert-hall 
of the Madison Square Garden; and I soon began 
to be aware that the club had lost much of its social 
character when it had to abandon the private house 
of its founder, where the atmosphere was intimate 
and informal, and when it was forced to make the 
best of a hired hall wholly without any friendly 
associations. It had been inspired by the indefati- 
gable energy of Courtlandt Palmer himself, and he 
had imparted to it an impulse which survived with 
diminishing power thru Thompson's presidency and 
mine. 

Yet in these later years we did not lack a long list 



238 THESE MANY YEARS 

of distinguished speakers — Thomas Wentworth Hig- 
ginson, Theodore Roosevelt, Bronson Howard, Nicho- 
las Murray Butler, Dion Boucicault; these are only 
a few names taken at random from our roll. In 
fact, I think that the most notable evening of the 
whole career of the club was one of those which il- 
lumined the administration of the second president; 
and I have often regretted that we did not then de- 
cide to go out of existence, expiring in a glittering 
blaze of irradiated glory. This most remarkable 
of all the meetings of the Nineteenth Century Club 
was held in the spring of 1889, during Coquelin's 
first visit to the United States. I persuaded him 
to deliver a lecture on 'Moliere and Shakspere,' 
in French, of course; and we decided to have all 
the other speeches in the tongue of our Revolutionary 
allies. Thompson asked me to preside for once in 
his stead, and the two debaters were Frederic R. 
Coudert and General Horace Porter. The contrast 
of the French which fell from the mouths of the four 
successive speakers was as amusing as it was instruc- 
tive. Coquelin's revealed the choice vocabulary 
and the pellucid diction of the Comedie-Frangaise; 
Coudert's had the old-fashioned grace of the eight- 
eenth century, when his family had left France; 
General Porter's had the straightforward vigor of 
West Point; and upon my own I must refrain from 
commenting. I admit that I felt the justice of an 
editorial remark in one of the daily papers the morn- 
ing after the event to the effect that, at the Nine- 
teenth Century Club, in the competition in speaking 
French, General Porter and Mr. Brander Matthews 



CONCERNING CLUBS 239 

deserved the prize for application, while that for 
natural ability must be awarded to M. Coquelin. 

I should be derelict to my duty if I failed to declare 
here that I owed to my long membership in the 
Nineteenth Century Club more than the memory of 
many pleasant and profitable evenings, for I have a 
deeper debt to acknowledge. Because I was a mem- 
ber who might be called upon to speak, I was forced 
to learn how to speak. In my undergraduate days 
I had not profited by the scant opportunities for 
debating in the Philolexian Society to which I be- 
longed; and in the law school, when I had once 
risen to take part in a moot-court, I had made a 
lamentable failure when my classmates were success- 
ful. Therefore, I had come to the conclusion that 
the ability to make an address was the gift of God, 
and that it was a boon not divinely bestowed upon 
me. I heard other men rise to their feet and speak 
easily and aptly, and I credited their achievement to 
nature alone, never suspecting the art which made 
it possible. I hope I did not meanly envy those 
whom I found in possession of this gift; but I re- 
gretted keenly that it had not been granted to me. 

I ought to have known better, since I had gained 
a certain facility with my pen by dint of incessant 
practice, by taking pains and sparing no trouble to 
discover, first, what I thought I wanted to say and, 
second, how to say it clearly and concisely. By 
good luck I fell in with the little paper of brief but 
pregnant hints to the tyro orator which Colonel 
Higginson had drawn from his own practice and his 
own experience. The reading of that essay opened 



240 THESE MANY YEARS 

my eyes to the fact I had scarcely before suspected — 
that it is as much an art to speak on the feet as it 
is to write at the desk. If I had taught myself 
how to write I did not see why I could not in time 
teach myself how to speak. And I straightway set 
about the task of finding out the elementary prin- 
ciples of the art and of applying them as assiduously 
as possible. The few sentences that I was able to 
stammer thru the first time I rose to take part in 
the exercises of the Nineteenth Century were very 
few indeed. I doubt if I was on my feet for more 
than five or six minutes. Yet, few as they were, 
and ragged as they might be, they were carefully 
prepared, with a carefulness out of all proportion to 
their value. 

And when I say this, I mean that my trouble was 
out of all proportion to the value to others, for to 
me my remarks were inestimable, since they proved 
that if I chose I could say what I had to say as 
effectively to a hundred auditors as I might say it to 
a single friend. That first attempt was no triumph, 
far from it; but at least it was not blank defeat. 
And I came home with a resolve that the next time I 
had to address the club I would be at least as well 
prepared and, if possible, less hesitating and less 
jerky. The occasions when I was called upon were 
increasingly frequent until during my two years as 
president I had to speak, however briefly, two or 
three times at every meeting. Now as I look back 
at my efforts of more than thirty years ago I realize 
that I was not altogether in the wrong in holding 
that true eloquence is the gift of God, and that the 



CONCERNING CLUBS 241 

divine boon had not been bestowed on me. Not only 
did I lack the endowment of the orator, but I had 
begun far too late in life to overcome the manifold 
difficulties of a marvellously difficult art. Yet I 
rejoice that I persevered until I had attained to the 
facility which comes with practice and to the con- 
fidence which is supported by experience. The 
appeal of the spoken word was never more potent 
than it is to-day, even if the written word abides 
longer. It is a precious possession to be able to 
look your audiences in the eye and to tell them 
what you have in your heart, even if your periods 
are pedestrian and even if your lips have never been 
touched with a coal of fire. 



CHAPTER XI 
CRITICISM AND FICTION 



A LTHO it seemed more convenient to con- 
/\ centrate, in the preceding chapter, an account 
k of the various organizations with which I 
chanced to be connected, it must not be supposed 
that they unduly distracted my attention from my 
labors as a man of letters. I have noted that I 
edited two early American plays for the Dunlap 
Society, and that I joined force with Hutton in 1886- 
1887 in the editing of Bernard's 'Retrospections of 
America' and of the five volumes devoted to 'Actors 
and Actresses' ; and from time to time I was respon- 
sible for other pieces of editing, journeyman work of 
a modest kind, even if not without its utility. In 
1882, I had prepared a selection of the 'Poems of 
American Patriotism'; and in 1886 I made ready 
another anthology, 'Ballads of Books,' which was 
enriched by poems written especially for it by Bun- 
ner, Lathrop and Walter Learned in America, and 
by Austin Dobson, Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, 
and Walter Pollock in England, friends whom I shall 
consider in my next chapter, and which was re- 
edited and enlarged in a London edition by Lang. 
My vanity compels me to note that both of these 

242 



CRITICISM AND FICTION 243 

selections were pioneers and that the fields I was 
then the first to plow have been diligently culti- 
vated since by other compilers. 

In 1884 I edited the 'Rivals' and the "School for 
Scandal,' prefixing a biography of Sheridan. And 
in 1891, I made a selection of Charles Lamb's 
'Dramatic Essays,' with an introduction wherein I 
had the pleasure of pointing out that his unpre- 
tending farce, 'Mr. H,' which had dismally failed in 
London, leaving its disappointed author greatly 
grieved by "the deep damnation of its taking off," 
had been continuously successful in Philadelphia — 
a fact which would have mightily cheered Elia if it 
had ever come to his knowledge. 

Besides this editing, I was continuously engaged 
in book-reviewing for the Nation and for the Critic, 
contributing to the first number of the latter in 
January, 1883. For the Critic I continued to write 
during the whole of its thirty years of existence. 
It was edited by a sister and a brother of Richard 
Watson Gilder; and so keen was his delicate sense 
of propriety that he did not permit any one of his 
successive volumes of verse to be reviewed in its 
pages. Here his attitude was in marked contrast 
with that of those in control of other critical jour- 
nals for which I have written, which made a prac- 
tice of reviewing the books of their contributors, 
and even of their editors. 

As I look back on my book-reviewing in those 
early years of comparative inexperience, I cannot 
but confess that not a little of it was tainted by a 
vice only too common in the anonymous criticism 



244 THESE MANY YEARS 

of youthful writers. It was likely to have an undue 
proportion of trivial faultfinding in which I dis- 
played my diligence in picking out all the petty de- 
fects which I was able to discover. No doubt, these 
blemishes were all there, but to list them with per- 
sistent particularity was to risk conveying to the 
reader a false impression of the merit of the book 
under review. I was prone to show off the extent 
and the exactness of my own information about the 
subject; and I could do this only at the expense of 
the author. I had not then found out the under- 
lying principle of the art of book-reviewing — that 
the reviewer ought to be a taster for the benefit of 
his readers. In journalism, daily or weekly, what is 
most needed is news about the contents of the latest 
books, an honest report prepared solely for the 
guidance of the subscribers to the newspaper, with 
no obligation to lecture the authors of the volumes 
considered. 

As Jules Lemaitre once tersely declared, "criti- 
cism of our contemporaries is not criticism, it is con- 
versation"; and even if this may be considered as 
an overstatement of the case, it cannot be dismissed 
as a misstatement. In general, criticism that is 
truly criticism devotes itself to the works which 
have been tested by time; and it refrains from a 
vain expenditure of its force upon the ephemeral 
books of the moment only. But it is only with the 
books of the moment that journalism has to deal; 
and it is the duty of the book-reviewer to declare 
what manner of book each of the volumes may be 
which he considers in turn, and to indicate summarily 



CRITICISM AND FICTION 245 

how good it is of its kind, so that the readers who 
like that kind of book will be guided to get it, or to 
go without it. To say this is not to suggest that 
the competent journalist must abstain from crit- 
icism; it is only to point out that his criticism may 
be implicit rather than explicit; and that it can be 
most useful when it expresses itself in selection and 
in proportion, rather than in an effort at a final 
evaluation almost impossible until the book can be 
viewed in a longer perspective. 

Another disadvantage of my reviewing in the 
Nation and the Critic I came to feel more forcibly the 
more I was engaged in it — its anonymity. During 
twenty or thirty years I wrote too many anonymous 
reviews for me now to be willing to accept Schopen- 
hauer's declaration that an anonymous review is to 
be classed with an anonymous letter — a thing of 
which no gentleman would be guilty. Yet I came 
in time to have an acute distaste for expressing my 
opinion about an author which I could not warrant 
with my signature. Often, it is true, my anonymity 
was only nominal; and the veil was rent, for exam- 
ple, whenever the semiannual index of the Nation 
appeared. Nor did I ever attempt to conceal my 
responsibility for any adverse opinions I had occa- 
sion to express. Often it is urged in behalf of anony- 
mous reviewing that it is the only method which will 
permit the frank expression of searching condemna- 
tion; but to urge this is to condemn anonymity, 
since this is charging that the reviewer will be 
honest only when he is masked. And it is abun- 
dantly disproved by the courage common in the 



246 THESE MANY YEARS 

signed reviews which now appear in the Dial, the 
Educational Review and the Political Science Quar- 
terly. 

Altho I did not at once abandon anonymous 
reviewing, since that was the practice of the papers 
for which I was writing, I had my dislike for it 
intensified by an incident which occurred in 1887, 
when Hutton was editing the 'American Actor 
Series,' to which Kate Field contributed a life of 
Charles Fechter. This was a pretty good book, 
in spite of the fact that she greatly overestimated 
the quality of Fechter's art, under the influence of 
Dickens's characteristically emphatic eulogy. Fech- 
ter was a very picturesque actor, and to this day 
certain of his highly effective attitudes rise before 
my eyes — notably that in the last act of c Ruy 
Bias' when he suggested by gesture that he was 
the headsman about to execute the villain. Yet 
with all his picturesqueness he was prosaic, and as 
' Hamlet ' he stripped the part of its poetry, reducing 
the play to its supporting skeleton of melodrama. 
His career in England and in America Kate Field 
had handled very well; but she entirely misconceived 
the position he had held in France. In reviewing her 
book in the Nation, I had dwelt on this defect, prob- 
ably to show off my private knowledge of Parisian 
stage history. Still I think that my article was in 
the main accurate; and I certainly had no desire to 
be unkind. 

I heard later from a friend of hers who was also a 
friend of mine that my review wounded her griev- 
ously, and that she wondered who could have been 



CRITICISM AND FICTION 247 

guilty of it. As it happened, not long after it ap- 
peared, we dined with the Stedmans, and I took 
in Kate Field to dinner. We had never met before; 
and as we were both interested in the theater our 
talk turned upon the stage. And, so our common 
friend informed me later, she suddenly jumped to 
the conclusion that I must be the writer of the review 
which had hurt her feelings so keenly. But by no 
change of her cordiality toward me was I led then 
to suspect this discovery at the dinner-table. Her 
manner remained serene, perhaps more obviously so 
than mine, since I was inwardly conscious of the 
anonymity of my review. I recall that I regretted 
not what I had said, but that it was not signed with 
my name, so that we might have met for the first 
time, knowing each of us where we stood. 

The year after the founding of the Critic I had a 
brief experience as a reviewer of the acted drama. 
Henry Holt made me acquainted with a young 
architect, John Ames Mitchell, recently returned 
from Paris and planning to start a new weekly. He 
asked me for suggestions; I made many; and when 
the first number of Life appeared in the first week of 
1884, I found that he had adopted none of them. 
He did, however, enlist me as his theatrical critic; 
and for several months I contributed a weekly 
article, signed by a pseudonym I was then in 
the habit of using occasionally — "Arthur Penn." 
These weekly articles were cast in form of dialogs, 
supposed to have taken place before, during, and 
after the performance of the plays I was reporting 
upon; and it was by means of this give-and-take 



248 THESE MANY YEARS 

of conversation that I managed to insinuate my 
criticism of the several performances. 



II 

Dialog I was also using about that time in the 
short-stories that I was writing, either alone or in 
collaboration. I had attempted fiction while I was 
still in the law school; and a crudely sensational 
serial of mine had seen the light in one of the many 
weekly papers which issued in the seventies and 
eighties from the publishing house of Frank Leslie. 
Fortunately this weekly circulated only among the 
non-literary; and this sin of my youth has never 
been brought up against me. It is now nearly two- 
score years since I have seen it and I do not recall 
any of its incidents, but I suppose I must have 
modelled it more or less upon the Dime Novels 
with which Beadle had delighted my boyhood. 

In the first stories I wrote after I had begun to 
contribute to the better magazines there is no trace 
of my earlier sensational strivings, for my model 
was then the ingeniously invented tale of Thomas 
Bailey Aldrich, with an amusing twist of surprise 
at the end of it; and a little later still I came under 
the influence of the less artificial cleverness of 
Ludovic Halevy. When Bunner and I became 
intimate we had never-ending discussions over our 
favorite story-tellers; and I discovered that he ad- 
mired the dexterity of Aldrich as much as I did — 
altho I doubt if mere dexterity was ever as satisfy- 
ing to him at any time as it was to me then. 



CRITICISM AND FICTION 249 

One day in the spring of 1879, when we had been 
analyzing the device whereby Aldrich had achieved 
the reader's complete acceptance of the non-existent 
heroine of his ever delightful 'Margery Daw,' which 
remains one of the masterpieces of the short-story, 
we both expressed our regret that the interchange of 
letters and of telegrams had not been kept up to 
the end of the tale, of which the final page or two 
Aldrich had more tamely treated as plain narra- 
tive. We agreed that the epistolary form might 
have been preserved thruout; and then one or the 
other of us suggested that since Aldrich had car- 
ried on his story by commingling letters and tele- 
grams, it might be amusing to eschew narrative 
altogether, and to construct a coherent series of 
events to be revealed to the reader by means of 
letters and telegrams mixed up with all sorts of other 
things, newspaper paragraphs, advertisements, play- 
bills, pawn-tickets, and so forth. 

We set to work at once and in a few days we con- 
cocted a story which we called the 'Documents in 
the Case.' At first we had intended to manufacture 
twoscore items less one so that we might entitle 
our fragmentary narrative the 'Thirty-nine Articles,' 
but we soon relinquished this irreverent name. 
When our story was printed in Scribner's Monthly 
the novelty of its form attracted attention; and we 
were amused to see that our framework was bor- 
rowed by half-a-dozen other story-tellers in the 
course of the next few months. 

This was in 1879; and it was then that Emile 
Zola was shouldering himself to the front in France, 



250 THESE MANY YEARS 

frequently putting forth critical papers wherein he 
proclaimed the need for a new departure in fiction 
in accord with the principles of "Naturalism," 
which prescribed that the novelist should avail 
himself abundantly of "human documents." Every 
new movement in art has always insisted on the 
necessity of returning to "Nature," a chameleon- 
word changing color with every gaze that rests on 
it. Bunner and I knew that our 'Documents in 
the Case,' a most artificially contrived story, owing 
its sole merit not to its veracity but to its novelty 
of construction, had nothing in common with the 
"human documents" for the employment of which 
Zola was pleading passionately. But this knowledge 
did not deter us from sending it to him, accompanied 
by a letter in which, with the calm impudence of 
irresponsible youth, we called his sympathetic atten- 
tion to our use of documents. Our missive was 
written in our best French; and we promptly 
received a reply to it — a reply addressed to "Mes- 
sieurs Brander et Bunner, au journal Puck, 21 et 
22 Warren-Street, New York." This response was 
brief and characteristic; and I venture to translate 
it in full: 

Medan, 19 " Sept., 1879. 
Messieues: 

I have not received the American magazine of which 
you speak. And if I had received it, I could not have 
read you, for, alas ! I am ignorant of English. I am 
none the less touched by the sympathy which you have 
kindly testified to me; and I am very happy to learn 
that my ideas — which are in fact only the ideas of every 
intelligent man of my age — are finding an echo in America. 



CRITICISM AND FICTION £51 

There is a rising in mass of all those who desire truth 
and justice by the aid of knowledge. 

Thank you again, and greeting you once more, 

Emile Zola. 



In collaboration with Bunner I composed another 
short-story, wholly in dialog this time, entitled 
the 'Seven Conversations of Dear Jones and Baby 
Van Benssellaer.' And in 1884, Bunner and I put 
forth together our first volume of fiction, 'In Part- 
nership. Studies in Story-Telling,' which included 
the two tales we had written together and half-a- 
dozen more, written by one or the other of us sepa- 
rately. Collaboration is always a mystery to those 
who have not tried it, and who can never under- 
stand how two writers can combine to tell one 
story. And collaboration is also often a mystery 
even to those who have tried it, because each of 
them is frequently unable to separate his own 
share of the joint labor from that of his associate. 
I find that I have preserved the original list of the 
successive items which were to be our documents; 
and by the initials pencilled against one or another 
of these items I am reminded that Bunner wrote 
the paragraph which is a parody of Bret Harte, and 
that I wrote the letter which is an imitation of John 
Phoenix. But whether he or I was responsible for 
any specific one of the others, I cannot now recall; 
and indeed I feel sure that we were both responsible 
for all of them, since he may have suggested an item 
that I wrote, and I may have proposed an item that 
he preferred to pen. If the collaboration has been 



252 THESE MANY YEARS 

on a true partnership, if it has resulted in a chemical 
union rather than a mechanical mixture, there is 
no more possibility of deciding upon the authorship 
of this or that part of the work than there is of de- 
claring whether the father or the mother is the real 
parent of their child. 

Collaboration has always been very attractive to 
me; and it has always been the result of the intimacy 
of friendship with its corresponding sympathy of 
interest. My collaborators were friends before we 
undertook a task in common; and they remained 
my friends in spite of the opportunities for dispute 
due to the partnership itself. It is a fact that 
the "artistic temperament" is jealous and touchy; 
and this is probably why the famous collaborations 
of Erckmann-Chatrian and of Meilhac and Halevy 
were violently dissolved. It may be that I am 
lacking in the "artistic temperament," since my 
varied associations only cemented the friendships 
which had preceded them. 

I have recorded that I had Hutton for a partner 
in the editing of two books and Bunner in the writing 
of two short-stories. In other essays in fiction I 
collaborated later with George H. Jessop, Walter 
Harris Pollock, and "F. Anstey"; and I was even 
enabled to publish, in 1891, a volume containing 
half-a-dozen stories and entitled 'With My Friends. 
Tales Told in Partnership.' In a later chapter, 
when I come to consider my essays in play-writing, 
I shall have to chronicle the same kind of intimate 
association with Bunner, with Jessop, and finally 
with Bronson Howard. 



CRITICISM AND FICTION 253 



III 

Before speaking further about these earlier efforts 
in fiction, I must digress for a moment to remark 
upon the signature which was appended to them. I 
had been christened James Brander, after my 
mother's father, and James was also the name of 
my father's father. Yet I had never been known in 
the family by any other name than Brander. A 
few — a very few, indeed — of my classmates in 
college had called me "Jim"; but the majority of 
those who knew me were not aware that I had a 
right to sign myself James. In the title-pages of 
my two or three earliest books I had subscribed 
myself as "J. Brander Matthews," altho I had not 
a little sympathy with those who held that there 
was a smack of affectation about that method of 
telescoping a proper name. And I soon found that 
this method had the immediate disadvantage of 
lending itself to an unsatisfactory condensation into 
"J. B. Matthews." It seemed to me that J. B. 
Matthews was but a feeble trade-mark for a man 
of letters who had to vend his wares in the open 
market. So I resolved to drop the preliminary J. 
and thereafter I appeared on my title-pages simply 
Brander Matthews, a name individual enough to 
cling to the memory of those who run as they read. 

Here I was following the example of Bret Harte, 
who had dropped a preliminary F.; of Bayard 
Taylor, who had cancelled a James; and of Austin 
Dobson, who had deprived himself of a Henry. I 



254 THESE MANY YEARS 

found out later that John Hay had likewise manu- 
factured his own bold name, after having been 
matriculated in college as J. Milton Hay, and that 
Rudyard Kipling had killed off a preliminary Joseph. 
It seems to me only fair to allow every man to decide 
for himself the name by which he desires to be known ; 
and so I resolutely slaughtered the J. that I had 
inherited from both of my grandfathers. But the 
scrupulous bibliographers refuse me permission for 
this initial assassination; and the ghost of that long- 
departed J. still stalks across the pages of catalogs. 
Moreover, there exist makers of lists, less meticulous 
than the conscientious bibliographers ; and they have 
assumed a non-existent hyphen between the Brander 
and the Matthews, and therefore transfer me from 
under the M., where I belong, to the B., where I am 
wholly out of place. 

Most of the early short-stories which bore my 
self-made signature appeared in Scribner's Monthly, 
or in Harper's. I was on the best of terms with 
the editors of both; and well as I knew them, 
and well as I supposed I had ascertained their 
respective likings, I never could be certain of accep- 
tance. For instance, I had no doubt whatever 
that Gilder would take a humorous tale which I 
called the 'Rival Ghosts'; but he declined it; and 
it was immediately welcomed warmly by Alden. 
To Harper's, as the more receptive, I sent my next 
story, 'Love at First Sight'; and it speedily came 
back to me, whereupon I submitted it to Scribner's, 
where it instantly found a resting-place. To this 
day I can see no explanation of this attitude of the 



CRITICISM AND FICTION 255 

friendly editors. So far as I can see the 'Rival 
Ghosts' would have been just as suitable to Scrib- 
ner's as 'Love at First Sight,' and 'Love at First 
Sight' just as suitable to Harper's as the 'Rival 
Ghosts.' 

I could now understand easily enough why both 
editors should have refused both stories, for when I 
read them over, not long ago, they seemed to me 
slight and artificial. They were "clever," and they 
had little other merit than their cleverness. Lest 
I may seem to be affecting a false modesty, I must 
add that I still find in my short-stories of these 
'prentice days an ingenuity in plot-making and a 
neatness of construction, which I am inclined to 
ascribe to a constant study of the deft play-makers 
of Paris. These tales had an atmosphere of brisk- 
ness, even if their apparent brightness did not 
disguise their indisputable lightness. They were, 
perhaps, no more superficial than the majority of 
magazine fictions, altho I am not at all sure of this; 
but they lacked the sweep of emotion which touches 
the heart and the depth of character-delineation 
which fingers in the mind. 

I perceive also that in those days I was more keenly 
interested in the form than in the content. It was 
on the method rather than on the matter that I 
spent my effort. In the 'Documents in the Case/ 
for instance, the story itself was relatively unim- 
portant and we relied upon the unhackneyed way 
in which we presented it. In 'One Story Is Good 
till Another Is Told,' which I wrote with Jessop, we 
simply narrated twice the same set of incidents as 



256 THESE MANY YEARS 

seen thru two different pairs of eyes. In the c Story 
of a Story' I set down in succession a swift glimpse 
of the author who wrote the tale, of the editor who 
accepted it, of the artist who illustrated it, of the 
printer who set it up, and of four or five of the 
readers into whose hands it chanced to fall. In 
'Two Letters' I employed a device not dissimilar; 
and I varied this only a little in 'A Cameo and a 
Pastel,' — the pastel being an attempt to convey 
the impression made on me by a midnight party at 
the studio of William M. Chase to see Carmencita 
dance, whereas the cameo set over against it was an 
attempt to resuscitate a symposium at the house 
of Maecenas when he entertained Vergil and Horace 
with two Gaditanian dancers. In all these essays 
in fiction the frame now appears to me to be more 
prominent than the picture itself. 

The scene of most of these short-stories was 
generally laid in New York, the city that I knew 
best and loved best, altho I was not then seeking to 
convey its characteristic atmosphere. The period 
was generally the present, as I rarely ventured into 
an era other than my own. And I took advantage 
of this uniformity of time and place to carry over 
characters from one story to another. The "Dear 
Jones" and the "Baby Van Renssellaer" whom 
Bunner and I compelled to carry on 'Seven Con- 
versations' had already talked to one another in 
my 'Rival Ghosts.' It amused me to bring forward 
prominently in one narrative persons of my creating 
who had figured in subordinate positions in an earlier 
experience. "There is a fascination," so Howells 



CRITICISM AND FICTION 257 

has told us, "which every writer of fiction will own, 
in recurring to a type once studied; but the novelist 
indulges this fancy at some risk of wearying his 
readers." I doubt if I indulged this fancy often 
enough to weary my readers; and even if I did, I 
might now ascribe their weariness to other causes. 

I carried over a group of these characters from my 
short-stories to a story long enough to stand by 
itself in a volume, long enough, indeed, to be con- 
sidered as a novel. I can see now that the "Last 
Meeting' lacked not a little of the breadth and the 
depth of a real novel, that it was in fact only a short- 
story writ large, and that it would have gained in 
effect if it had been kept down to the dimensions 
of a novelet. It had at the core of it what I still 
believe to be a fine romantic idea; and I am con- 
firmed in this belief by the fact that Robert Louis 
Stevenson shared it. 



CHAPTER XII 
EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 



I HAD visited London repeatedly in my youth; 
and I had spent several weeks there in 1873, on 
my wedding trip. But the dingy town had never 
appealed to me as Paris did. I am inclined to think 
that this lack of attraction is to be attributed not 
so much to the contrast of the gray skies of the 
English city with the sparkling sunshine of its French 
rival as to the fact that our family was likely always 
to find friends in Paris, whereas we had few acquain- 
tances in London. In the seventies I looked upon the 
British metropolis as a place to be passed thru 
swiftly, while the French capital was a place where 
we could settle down for a stay. In the eighties 
these conditions changed; and as I came to have 
more friends in London than in Paris, I began to 
abridge my visits to France and to abide longer 
and longer in England. It was to Austin Dobson 
that I owed my introduction to a circle of literary 
men whose welcome soon made London rather than 
Paris the goal of my summer voyaging. 

Ever since I had chanced to come across Frederick 
Locker's 'Lyra Elegantiarum,' — I think in 1870 — 
I had delighted in society verse, as it is often mis- 
called, vers de societe, "familiar verse," as Cowper 

258 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 259 

termed it, the brief, brilliant, buoyant lyric of Praed 
and Locker and Holmes; and when I came into 
possession of Dobson's 'Proverbs in Porcelain,' in 
the spring of 1878, I was fascinated by the delicate 
art with which he had acclimated the foreign ballade 
and rondeau and triolet to our ruder tongue, be- 
stowing upon his metrical experiments the blithe 
spirit of English familiar verse. I reviewed his poems 
promptly for the Nation; and I prepared a paper 
for Appleton's Journal explaining the principle of 
these fixed forms and illustrating the theory by ex- 
amples taken from 'Proverbs in Porcelain.' Bunner 
shared my interest in these novel additions to 
metrical practice; and we published in Scribner's 
Monthly and in Puck the earliest American examples 
of the rondeau and the ballade. I believe that my 
paper in Appletons on 'Varieties of Verse' was the 
pioneer essay introducing the French forms to Ameri- 
can readers. 

With his customary kindness, Stedman forwarded 
this article of mine to Dobson, informing him that 
its author was going over to England that summer; 
and with his customary kindness Dobson wrote 
back, asking Stedman to send me word that he would 
be glad to see me when I was in London. So it was 
that I made the acquaintance of Austin Dobson, an 
acquaintance that immediately ripened into a friend- 
ship enduring now for nearly twoscore years. Like 
so many other English men of letters, Dobson had 
a position in the civil service; and I found him in a 
remote room in the inner recesses of the group of 
old rambling houses in Whitehall Gardens, behind 



260 THESE MANY YEARS 

the Banqueting House, whence Charles I went to 
his beheading. The office in which Dobson did his 
daily work was low-ceilinged and dim, altho it had 
a window on the rear gardens that stretched down to 
the Thames Embankment. At that first meeting 
he called my attention to the fact that it was this 
dark and distant office he had in mind when he penned 
his lovely lyric 'To a Greek Girl,' in which he recap- 
tured not a little of the airy freedom and the ineffa- 
ble grace of the lighter Alexandrian poets. 

Where'er you pass, — where'er you go, 
I hear the pebbly rillets flow; 
Where'er you go, — where'er you pass, 
There comes a gladness on the grass; 
You bring blithe airs where'er you tread, — 

Blithe airs that blow from down and sea; 
You wake in me a Pan not dead, — 

Not wholly dead ! Antonoe ! 

In vain, — in vain ! The years divide; 
Where Thamis rolls a murky tide, 
I sit and fill my painful reams, 
And see you only in my dreams; — 
A vision like Alcestis, brought 

From under-lands of Memory, — 
A dream of Form in days of Thought, 

A dream, — a dream, Antonoe. 

By a curious coincidence I had received from 
Bunner, only a few days before Dobson quoted to 
me the two lines I have here italicized, a letter in 
which he told me of a midnight meeting with Francis 
S. Saltus, and of that uncertain poet's immediate 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 261 

appreciation of the exquisite fragrance of this lyric. 
Bunner reported that Saltus had suddenly pulled 
out a newspaper clipping with the remark that 
"this poem contains the whole spirit of Greece in 
four stanzas. I found it in a Baltimore paper, and 
I have written everywhere to find out who is the 
author. It is grand; it is beautiful; it is godlike. 
I have cried over it; I have hugged it; I have kissed 
it ! Listen : 

With breath of thyme and bees that hum, 
Across the grass you seem to come — " 

Then Bunner interrupted, crying, "Austin Dob- 
son !" and continuing the quotation, 

Across the years with nymph-like head, 
And wind-blown brows unfilleted. 

Saltus was delighted to discover the name of the 
author; and in his joy he read the poem aloud with 
a trembling voice. And after telling me this Bunner 
made the sensible comment that this perfervid en- 
thusiasm, ridiculous as it would be in either of us, 
seemed natural enough and even pardonable in 
Saltus, "that strange creature of genius." 



n 

But it is Dobson that I am now writing about and 
not Saltus, my old schoolfellow at Charlier's, who 
had a gleam of genius and whose life was to flicker 
out in gloom and disappointment. I had been able 



262 THESE MANY YEARS 

to go to the Board of Trade only a day or two before 
I left London for New York. In the three years 
that intervened before I went to Europe again Dob- 
son and I corresponded frequently. I was able to 
place poems of his (and also of Andrew Lang's, sent 
me by Dobson) in the pages of Scribner's Monthly ; 
and at his request I was glad to procure for his friend 
Frederick Locker one or two first editions of Ameri- 
can authors to fill vacancies in the Rowfant library. 

Then in 1881 I crossed the Atlantic again, arriv- 
ing in London more gladly than ever before, since I 
now had there one friend at least; and almost imme- 
diately I made half-a-dozen others. The Austin 
Dobsons invited us out to Ealing to meet the Ed- 
mund Gosses; and the Gosses invited us to their 
very pleasant Sunday afternoons, at the first of 
which I met Andrew Lang. 

From Dobson, Lang had learned that I was in- 
tending to write a life of Moliere — the biography 
which was not to appear until nearly thirty years 
later, and from Dobson I had learned that Lang 
was also contemplating a life of Moliere, which he 
had already outlined in an article in the Encyclopaedia 
Britannica, but wh;ch he was never to begin. So far 
from feeling that I was poaching on his preserves, he 
seized an early occasion at this first meeting to take 
me aside and to proffer to me all the books he had 
collected for his own use. This was characteristic 
of his large-mindedness; and magnanimity was 
only one of the elements of his charm. He had at 
first, so it seemed to me then, what I can, perhaps, 
best describe as an outer crust of Oxford aloofness, 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 263 

intended for external use only, and accompanied by 
a trace of toploftiness, which temporarily concealed 
his incessant friendliness, his active sympathy, and 
his constant cordiality. 

Lang was the most versatile, the most fecund, and 
the most learned man it was ever my good fortune 
to know intimately. He was the only scholar in the 
narrowest sense of the word (as well as in the wid- 
est) who was able to combine the pursuit of scholar- 
ship with the practice of daily and weekly journalism. 
When I first met him he was engaged in writing 
a daily editorial article in Daily News upon liter- 
ary and social topics; and a selection of these has 
been replevined from the swift oblivion of the back 
numbers in a volume entitled 'Lost Leaders.' He 
was printing two or three or four long articles every 
week in the Saturday Review, besides contributing 
unceasingly to other weeklies, to many monthlies, 
and not infrequently to the quarterlies. He was 
ready to write at any time upon any subject; and 
upon almost every subject he seemed to have special 
knowledge. Even when he lacked solid information 
his mind was so alert and so keen that he was able 
swiftly to seize the essential principles needed to 
formulate a valuable opinion. Of course, he had 
sometimes to treat topics not congenial; and I recall 
one paper of his, on Zola, wherein I failed to find his 
customary felicity. 

Yet these comparative failures were very few in- 
deed; and he rarely touched a subject that he did 
not adorn. His wealth of learning did not weight 
him down; and he wore the panoply of scholarship 



264 THESE MANY YEARS 

as unconsciously as a well-greaved Greek went forth 
to battle in full armor. His erudition did not debar 
him from lightness of touch; and he could be deli- 
riously witty even when he was girding at Max 
Miiller and disestablishing the sun-myth theories of 
that Anglo-Teutonic dogmatist. He was one of the 
best Grecians in England; and the prose translations 
of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Homeric hymns, and 
the Theocritan idyls, which he prepared (either 
in association with other scholars or alone), abide 
to prove his possession of the twofold qualification 
which many other translators fail to have — a 
mastery of the language into which he was translating 
equal to the mastery of the language out of which 
he was translating. 

He had as intimate an acquaintance with old 
French as he had with Greek; and his rendering of 
'Aucassin and Nicole tte' is as deftly and as delicately 
accurate as his version of Theocritus. He was one 
of the foremost folklorists of his time — supporting 
his own significant suggestions by a heterogeny of 
illustrations derived from his immense erudition. 
No one of his contemporaries had a clearer knowl- 
edge of the complicated genealogy of omnipresent 
myths or a sounder understanding of the circum- 
stances which brought about their spontaneous 
generation, century after century in widely scattered 
races. He contributed essential elements to that 
history of the totem which is still in dispute. And 
in all these researches into the barbaric past, and 
into the savage present, he revealed the sterling 
integrity of the scientific investigator. It may be 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 265 

that he was at times a little annoyed to perceive 
that some of his fellow-scientists were inclined to 
resent the incursion into an area they had pre- 
empted for their own of a writer who had won a 
wide reputation in two other fields as diametrically 
opposed as journalism and classical scholarship. 

There is a very natural tendency on the part of 
the narrow specialist, observable also even in the 
public at large, to disbelieve in the attainments 
of any one who disperses his activities in different 
directions; and there is no doubt that Lang's repu- 
tation in each of the departments in which he labored 
was a little less than it might have been had he con- 
fined himself solely to one specialty. His fame 
suffered from the fact that he was, in the apt phrase 
of Mrs. Malaprop, "like Cerberus, three single 
gentlemen in one." He was first of all a working 
journalist, then he was a scholar, abundant in con- 
tribution and discovery; and finally he was a man 
of letters. Nor is this a full statement of his infinite 
variety, for as a man of letters he appeared in three 
guises — as a critic, as an essayist, and as a poet. 
It never need be wondered at that a versatility so 
truly unique should awaken doubts — doubts natu- 
rally increased by Lang's possession of the dangerous 
gift of humor, by his inability to be stolidly serious, 
by a tricksy whimsicality which would sometimes 
flash across the pages of his graver inquiries, lighten- 
ing scholarship with wit. 

The general reader was made aware of his humor 
and his wit in the delightful 'Letters to Dead 
Authors,' essays in epistolary parody, one of the 



266 THESE MANY YEARS 

minor masterpieces of latter-day English literature, 
and probably the single volume of Lang's likely to 
survive longest — playful in temper, but acute in 
critical appreciation. He had the fourfold quali- 
fication of the genuine critic — insight, equipment, 
disinterestedness, and sympathy; and these quali- 
fications lifted his indefatigable contributions to the 
Saturday Review far above the average level of 
journalistic book-reviewing. Whatever he did he 
did with zest and gusto; and he did it in his own 
fashion, without effort to disguise his own individ- 
uality. He told me once that he had been called 
upon to review anonymously a volume of the En- 
cyclopaedia Britannica to which he had contributed 
an important article, and that he fell foul of his 
own contribution because it did not contain certain 
facts that had come to his knowledge since he had 
passed it for press — to the natural dissatisfaction of 
the editors of the cyclopedia, who instantly recog- 
nized Lang's handiwork in the unsigned review. 

He published three or four volumes of his lighter 
verse and of his metrical translations from the 
French and from the Greek. His only long poem, 
* Helen of Troy,' never received the approbation it 
merited. I was glad to be able to arrange for an 
American edition, issued by Charles Scribner's Sons; 
and when he acknowledged the publisher's check, 
he remarked that "they have generous ideas of pay- 
ment, those Scribneridse." He wrote verse as easily 
as he wrote prose, with an instinct for the inevitable 
word. I told him one day of the French gibe against 
Scribe, who was asserted to lay the scene of his 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 26? 

plays in a land of his own invention, where the 
manners and customs and laws were always pre- 
cisely in accord with the necessities of his plot. 
This far country had been designated as La Scribie. 
The day after we had had this chat I read in an 
afternoon paper a copy of verses called 'Partant 
pour la Scribie,' in which Lang described the undis- 
covered country as 

A land of lovers false and gay; 

A land where people dread a "curse"; 
A land of letters gone astray, 

Or intercepted, which is worse; 
Where weddings false fond maids betray, 

And all the babes are changed at nurse. 

I recall one afternoon when we were discussing 
the ways of improvisers, and when I challenged 
him to write a sonnet in fifteen minutes. He laughed 
and asked for a topic, which I gave him. He seized 
paper and pencil, as I took out my watch. He 
wrote thirteen lines in thirteen minutes; and then, 
with another laugh, he tore up what he had set down. 
On another occasion I was telling him of a story 
which I was going to write (and which I did write, 
calling it 'A Secret of the Sea'), wherein I proposed 
to have an ocean-liner held up by a yacht and forced 
to surrender the specie it was carrying. "Why 
write about it?" Lang asked gravely. "Wouldn't 
it be more fun to do it yourself ? " 

He was a lover of beautiful books, learned in the 
lore of bindings and of collectors; and I persuaded 
him to permit an American publisher to make a 



268 THESE MANY YEARS 

volume out of his scattered essays on these sub- 
jects. I collected the papers and made it ready for 
the press; and Lang sent over a triolet in which he 
dedicated to me this volume, entitled 'Books and 
Bookmen' : 

You took my vagrom essays in, 

You found them shelter over sea, — 

Beyond the Atlantic's foam and din 
You took my vagrom essays in ! 

If any reader there they win 

To you he owes them, not to me. 

You took my vagrom essays in, 

You found them shelter over sea. 

I may record also that in testimony to our equal 
devotion to Moliere, Lang inscribed to me the 
brilliant 'Ballade of Old Plays' in which he resus- 
citated in successive stanzas the customs of the 
court, the town, and the theater. 

When these old plays were new. 

Ill 

Thru the kindness of Dobson I had the pleasure, 
in 1881, of making the acquaintance of another of 
his intimate friends, Frederick Locker, who was soon 
after to assume the name of Locker-Lampson. He 
caused me to be invited to the Athenaeum Club, 
always difficult of access to strangers; and at the 
Athenaeum he introduced me one dismal afternoon 
to the dark-visaged Abraham Hayward, whom he 
persuaded to recite for us the ribald and libellous 
verses that Praed had rimed in dishonor of Lady 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 269 

Blessington — verses that Hayward always refused 
to write out, and that, therefore, perished with him. 
Like Hayward, who was the author of the article 
in the Quarterly which first proclaimed the value of 
'Vanity Fair,' then midway in its course of publica- 
tion in monthly parts, like Hayward, Locker had 
been a friend of Thackeray's. And it was Thackeray 
who had said to Locker when the latter was cast 
down by some editor's rejection of a poem — "Never 
mind, Locker, our verses may be small beer, but at 
any rate they are the right tap !" 

It was the tap from which Thackeray had drawn 
'Without and Within' and the 'Ballad of Bouilla- 
baisse,' and from which Praed drew the 'Belle of the 
Ball,' that Locker drew 'Piccadilly' and 'St. James's 
Street.' In the successive issues of his 'London 
Lyrics' Locker had varied the contents, rejecting 
earlier lyrics that had ceased to please him and 
inserting newer verses; and a little while before I 
met him he had asked Dobson to go over his poems 
and to make a selection of the best to appear as the 
definitive edition of 'London Lyrics.' This his 
younger friend had done with unerring discretion; 
and Locker gave to his friends, of whom I was then 
fortunately to be numbered, a privately printed 
volume, for which Dobson, who was responsible for 
the choice of its contents, had provided this condensed 
criticism in verse: 

Apollo made, one April day, 
A new thing in the riming way; 
Its turn was neat, its wit was clear, 



270 THESE MANY YEARS 

It wavered 'twixt a smile and tear; 
Then Momus gave a touch satiric, 
And it became a * London Lyric.' 



Locker was delighted with Dobson's selection of 
his best verses for this final book; but soon his heart 
began to yearn over the lost sheep, over the poems 
excluded to all eternity from paradise. At last he 
resisted no longer and herded all the outcasts into 
another privately printed volume which he en- 
titled 'London Rimes.' As he wrote me once, the 
worst in 'London Lyrics' is better than the best in 
'London Rimes'; none the less did the second little 
book go forth to take its place beside the first on 
the book-shelves of his friends. 

Locker had sent this definitive edition of the 
'Lyrics' to Gilder as well as to me; and Gilder 
asked me to write a critical essay on Locker for 
Scribner's Monthly, which was about to become the 
Century Magazine. With the aid of counsel from 
Dobson and from Bunner, I prepared the paper. 
After it appeared, Gilder agreed to let me write a 
companion piece on Dobson; and when next I 
went to London I sought counsel of Locker as the 
one fellow-poet most likely to help me to seize the 
essential traits of 'Vignettes in Rime' and 'Proverbs 
in Porcelain.' He spent two or three hours with me 
going over Dobson's work; and at the end of our 
several meetings I made a curious discovery. All 
unconsciously to himself, for he was as loyal to 
Dobson as Dobson was to him, he had been construct- 
ing a ring-fence around the restricted domain of 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 271 

vers de societe with himself inside the inclosure 
and with Dobson outside. I think that if I had 
then put to him in plain words his unformulated 
thought, he would have admitted it frankly, explain- 
ing that Dobson was too emphatically a poet for 
his Pegasus to be wholly at ease in the narrow 
paddock of familiar verse, wherein ample pasturage 
might be found for half-poets like himself. And I 
perceived that what Locker did not say in so many 
words was absolutely just. Dobson's muse wore 
the flowing robe proper for climbing the slopes of 
Parnassus, and only on occasion was she willing to 
appear in the tailor-made garb of her sister who 
inspired the lyrist of London. 

By these dark hints of Locker I profited when I 
penned my paper; and I did not hesitate to tell 
Dobson what Locker had intimated. For a moment, 
altho for a moment only, Dobson was taken aback. 
Then he admitted that Locker was quite right. "I 
think that the best of my work is not purely familiar 
verse," he admitted. "In fact, I wrote verse of 
that kind mainly because I saw that it provided an 
opening for me when I was young and unknown." 

I should be false to another friend if I failed to 
note here that Bunner's appreciation of Dobson's 
art was as helpful to me as Locker's. I find a letter 
of the time in which he sent me hints, calling the 
lines 'To a Greek Girl' the most purely beautiful of 
all Dobson's work, resting the spirit, if it did not 
touch the heart. "Most classicism shows us only 
the white temple, the clear high sky, the outward 
beauty of form and color. This ('To a Greek Girl') 



272 THESE MANY YEARS 

gives us the warm air of spring; the life that pulses 
in a girl's veins like the soft swelling of sap in a 
young tree. This is the same feeling that raises 
'As You Like It' above all pastoral poetry. Our 
nineteenth-century sensibilities are so played on 
by the troubles, the sorrows, the little vital needs 
and anxieties of the world around us, that some- 
times it does us good to get out into the woods and 
fields of another world entirely, if only the atmosphere 
is not chilled and rarefied by the lack of the breath 
of humanity." 

A few years later when I reprinted the papers on 
Locker and Dobson in a volume called 'Pen and 
Ink, Essays on Subjects of More or Less Importance,' 
I asked Bunner and Dobson for poems to go in the 
front and at the back of my book. They acceded 
to my request; Bunner's epistle in rime will be 
found at the end of my volume; but when Dobson 
gave me his verses he expressed a doubt as to the 
propriety of his contributing to a book containing 
a criticism of his own work. Since this appeared to 
him to be a question of taste, I could do no more 
than yield to his feeling; and Lang supplied me with 
a prefatory poem, 'Pen and Ink.' Dobson's lines 
may now appear in print for the first time : 

With pen and ink full many a sin 

The reckless race of men begin; 
Not only with their black or blue 
They stain the page of virgin hue; 

But thereupon, forsooth must spin 
Their tangled web of false and true 
With pen and ink ! 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 273 

And worse than this — they wily grin 
To think how all their kith and kin, 
Ay, and the long-eared Public, too, 
Must buy these desperate things they do, 
With pen and ink ! 

Space may also be found here for a briefer effort 
of the playful poet, only a couplet, that he inscribed 
in a copy of the original edition of Sheridan's 'Rivals,' 
published in 1775, which he sent me, after an un- 
toward delay, due to the dilatoriness of the book- 
binders : 

Behold the long-hoped gift arrive: — 
'Old Sherry — brand of Seventy-Five.' 

Before leaving Locker I must record two remarks 
of his. He had a high regard for the lighter lyrics 
of Holmes, calling him — in the preface to 'Lyra 
Elegantiarum ' — "perhaps the best living writer" 
of familiar verse. He paid the American poet the 
sincerest of compliments by borrowing the form of 
the 'Last Leaf for his own 'To My Grandmother': 

This relative of mine, 
Was she seventy-and-nine 

When she died ? 
By the canvas may be seen 
How she look'd at seventeen, 

As a bride. 

And one day when we were discussing the art of 
versification — it may have been during one of 
our long talks about Dobson — he drew my atten- 



274 THESE MANY YEARS 

tion to the peculiarity of this six-line stanza, declar- 
ing that it seemed to be easy, altho it was in fact 
very difficult. "In fact," he concluded, "I don't 
think that any one, excepting only Holmes and 
myself, has been really successful with it." 

When Mr. Cobden-Sanderson set up as a binder, 
Locker sent to ask if he would cover some books 
for him. To which the craftsman, in the pride of 
his achievement, responded that he did not care to 
bind "anything ephemeral." Locker suspected that 
this reply was intended to prevent his request to 
have his own 'London Lyrics' sumptuously pre- 
served for posterity in one of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson's 
magnificently decorated morocco covers; and this 
nettled him a little, so he sent word again that the 
volume he wished to have worthily bound was a 
first edition of Shakspere's 'Sonnets' — "if Mr. 
Cobden-Sanderson did not consider that too ephem- 
eral." 

IV 

Dobson and Lang and Gosse were members of 
the Savile Club, which had been founded by Sid- 
ney Colvin and which was then occupying a house 
in Savile Row — the same house in which Richard 
Brinsley Sheridan had died, as the tablet declared 
which the Society of Arts had placed on its front. 
One or another of my new-found friends put me up 
at the Savile during my successive visits to London, 
until I was elected a member, in 1885. A custom of 
the club made the path easy for the feet of the 
stranger within its doors; this was the social con- 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 275 

vention that those who chanced to sit side by side 
at luncheon or at dinner or in the smoking-room 
should feel at liberty to talk to one another without 
waiting for the formality of introduction. This is a 
sensible club tradition which makes for good-fellow- 
ship, as I soon found out for myself. One day I 
dropped in to lunch and sat at a table where I spied 
some one I knew. Next to him sat an alert little 
man with a keen face and sharp eyes; and before 
I had finished my lunch I recognized that I was in 
the presence of a master of conversation, a talker 
who could have held his own against John Hay or 
Clarence King. He was frank and unaffected, yet 
he had an air of distinction. His manner was most 
friendly and engaging, and when our modest meal 
was over, I followed him up-stairs to the smoking- 
room for our coffee. As we took our seats I saw 
Lang in the next room, and I rushed over to him, 
with an eager inquiry as to the name of the un- 
known conversationalist. Lang glanced back and 
answered: "That's Jenkin — Fleeming Jenkin. He's 
a great authority on drains !" 

At the moment the name did not mean anything 
to me; and I only wondered how it was that a per- 
sonality so interesting happened to be an authority 
on drains. As a matter of fact, Fleeming Jenkin 
was the originator of the system of sewage-disposal 
introduced into America by Colonel George E. 
Waring; and he spoke to me later most apprecia- 
tively of the American engineer's work. But he 
was more than an authority on drains, since he had 
been closely associated with Lord Kelvin in the 



276 THESE MANY YEARS 

development of transatlantic telegraphing. With 
characteristic enjoyment he narrated to me at a 
subsequent meeting, certain details of his visit to 
America in supervision of the Atlantic cables, and 
he dwelt with amusement on the swiftness with which 
he had cut short an effort of Jay Gould to bribe 
him. 

At the time I met him he was engaged in develop- 
ing a method of aerial transportation by means of 
electrical appliances, a system which he called tel- 
pherage, and in which he had as an associate, a 
young electrical engineer, Gordon Wigan, soon also 
to become a friend of mine. But it was not as a 
practical scientist that Jenkin interested me but as 
an artist in conversation; and yet when I try to 
recall specimens of his talk my memory is empty, 
and I think that this must be because he was not 
primarily a wit, crackling with quips readily remem- 
bered. He had wit in abundance but he was no 
mere phrase-maker; his wit was not concentrated 
in portable epigram, but dispersed and generally 
illuminating. His was a wit of ideas rather than a 
wit of words; and in him wit was less obvious than 
the free play of intelligence. Once in the smoking- 
room when a group of us were exchanging impres- 
sions, some one started a new topic and some one 
else turned to Jenkin and said: "You ought to have 
a theory about that." 

"Of course, I ought," Jenkin replied instantly. 
"And I'll make one on the spot just to satisfy 
you!" 

He had been a professor at the University of 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 277 

Edinburgh when Robert Louis Stevenson was an 
undergraduate there; and as a consequence of the 
friendship then begun, Stevenson prepared the pref- 
atory memoir for the two volumes of his literary 
and scientific remains. Perhaps because Stevenson 
was desperately ill when he accepted this unwel- 
come task out of loyalty to his dead friend, writing 
it in bed and rewriting it repeatedly to please the 
widow of his old professor, this memoir has always 
seemed to me the least successful of all Stevenson's 
works. It would be unfair to describe it as patroniz- 
ing; but when I first read it I could not but feel 
that Jenkin was a larger figure than he appeared 
in Stevenson's pages. Far better is the portrait 
in the pair of papers on 'Talk and Talkers' in which 
Jenkin figures as Cockshot, being contrasted with 
Gosse and Henley and R. A. M. Stevenson, all of 
whom I knew, finding no one of them more satis- 
factory in conversation than Jenkin. 

Fleeming Jenkin was one of the very few men I 
have met who knew anything about acting, the least 
understood of all the arts. Now and again I have 
found a player or a playwright who had an insight 
into the principles of this art; but almost the only 
laymen of my acquaintance possessed of a grasp of 
histrionic theory were Jenkin and his associate, 
Gordon Wigan — and the latter had it by inheri- 
tance, being a son of Alfred Wigan. It was Wigan 
who favored me with an annihilating criticism of 
a performer of long service in the London theaters. 
"I don't deny that he is the most scholarly and 
accomplished actor on our stage," was Wigan's re- 



278 THESE MANY YEARS 

mark; "but sooner than see him act I'd rather be 
all alone by myself in a dark room!" 

I recall that I capped this by quoting an American 
criticism of an American actor of equal prominence 
which was quite as damnatory since it consisted of 
a single sentence — "Mr. Blank's 'Hamlet' is no 
way to behave." 

With Wigan I had a point of contact other than 
our common enjoyment of acting; we were both 
students of the art of prestidigitation. So was a 
friend of his who soon became a friend of mine, 
Walter Herries Pollock, the brother of the present 
Sir Frederick Pollock and the son of the Sir Frederick 
Pollock who had edited Macready's 'Reminiscences.' 
When I made his acquaintance in the summer of 
1881, Walter Pollock was the second in command 
in the editorial office of the Saturday Review; and 
in our first talk I expressed my delight in a review 
of one of "Professor" Hoffman's manuals of par- 
lor-magic which had appeared in the Saturday a 
week or two earlier. "You shall meet the man who 
wrote that," said Pollock; "he is a very unusual 
man." And when I did meet him I soon found that 
this was not the overstatement of an enthusiastic 
friend, for the article on conjuring had been written 
by E. H. Palmer, professor of Arabic at Cambridge, 
and also at that time a chief leader-writer for the 
Standard. 

Palmer was an extraordinary creature of unusual 
appearance and of unusual attainments in out-of- 
the-way lines; and it was fortunate for me that I 
was able to make his acquaintance when I did, since 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 279 

the next summer, when he was attached as inter- 
preter-in-chief to the English expeditionary forces 
in Egypt, he was sent on a secret mission to the 
sheiks of the desert, in the course of which he was 
led into an ambush and slain. He and Wigan, 
Pollock and I were all followers of Robert-Houdin, 
and we chose to believe that as the original Rosi- 
crucians had possibly been professional conjurors, 
we felt ourselves authorized to revive the Brother- 
hood. Like all adepts in modern magic, we took no 
stock in the manipulations of professional spiritual 
mediums; and as Pollock ascertained that a dis- 
tinguished man of science, also a member of the 
Savile, had leanings toward spiritualism, he organ- 
ized a seance at his house with intent to prove that 
the magicians who made no pretense to super- 
natural powers could work marvels quite as mysteri- 
ous as those exhibited by the spiritualists. 

The burden of this enterprise fell upon Palmer; 
and about a dozen of us, including the man of 
science, met at Pollock's for a couple of hours one 
evening. His house had on its main floor two rooms, 
a drawing-room and a dining-room, separated by a 
smaller antechamber. Two of the manifestations 
deserve a detailed record. In one of them, an illus- 
tration of thought-transference, Palmer sat himself 
down at the dining-table in the rear room with his 
back to the drawing-room, in which Pollock was 
seated at another table, with his back to the dining- 
room; and before each of them was a chess-board 
with its complete complement of men. The rest 
of us wandered from one table to the other, while 



280 THESE MANY YEARS 

Wigan stood in the antechamber between, to act 
as umpire. With watch in hand he called out 
"Black can make his first move," whereupon Palmer 
pushed forward a pawn. Without any possibility 
of communication Pollock instantly copied that move 
on the board before him, and then pushed forward 
one of his own pawns, a move immediately repeated 
by Palmer in the other room. Then the umpire 
called on Black to make a second move, which Pol- 
lock imitated, making his second move in response. 
And so the silent game was played out to the end 
with no interchange of signals from one player to 
the other. I confess that this mystery might have 
baffled me if I had not known in advance that the 
game had been memorized by both players. 

Then Palmer was blindfolded and stationed in 
a far corner of the drawing-room, while the rest of 
us gathered in the dining-room about the scientific 
man who was to write a number which Palmer was 
to divine at a distance. I saw the number written; 
it was 666; and I saw also that the prearranged 
signal which was to convey it to the blindfolded 
guesser had failed to reach him. While Pollock 
and Wigan were holding the attention of the others, 
in a vain effort to work the secret system of com- 
munication, I slipped back to Palmer and whispered 
the number to him. He gave me time to resume 
my place with the others, who had not noticed my 
absence; and then with a shout he sprang up and 
tore the handkerchief from his eyes and rushed 
toward us, his grayish hair bristling as he came 
forward, as tho under a potent spell. "What is 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 281 

this?" he cried in awestruck tones. "I do not see 
a number. What I behold is a huge horned beast — 
a beast with seven horns ! " 

And we all know that the number of the Beast 
was six hundred and sixty and six. 



Palmer and Pollock were equally intimate with 
Walter Besant, the novelist, then the secretary of 
the Palestine Exploration Fund; in fact, they were 
both collaborators of his, since Pollock and Besant 
had joined forces in a short story or two, and in an 
adaptation of 'Gringoire,' while Palmer and Besant 
had been jointly responsible for a history of Jeru- 
salem. And Besant was a close friend of Charles 
Godfrey Leland, the rimer of the ballads of "Hans 
Breitmann," who was also a close friend of Palmer's, 
with whom he used to patter Romany — the gipsy 
tongue being Leland's specialty, and being only one 
out of the many strange languages that Palmer 
had mastered for the fun of it. To Leland was due 
the establishment in the early eighties of an inter- 
mittent dining-club, which lasted some ten years, 
and which never quite attained the power and pres- 
tige that he hoped for it. This was the Rabelais 
Club, designed to bring together all those in Europe 
and America revering the memory of the Master, 
who was one of the wisest men of his time and one 
of the mightiest humorists of all time. 

Lord Houghton accepted the presidency; Besant 
and Pollock were the secretaries; and it had grown 



282 THESE MANY YEARS 

to a membership of perhaps twoscore when either 
Besant or Pollock invited me to one of its infrequent 
dinners. I think that this was in 1883, and the 
next year I was elected a member, altho I expressed 
a modest doubt to Besant, when he proposed me, as 
to my competence to pass a Pantagruelist examina- 
tion. A characteristic smile broadened his face as 
he explained that the Rabelais Club admitted mem- 
bers of two different sets of qualifications. "To be 
worthy of acceptance, you must declare on oath 
that you have diligently read the works of the Mas- 
ter, or else you must make affidavit that you have 
not read them faithfully. So long as you can make 
one or the other of these declarations you are eligible." 
There were already several Americans besides 
Leland in the Rabelais when I joined — Holmes, 
Longfellow and Lowell, Henry James and Bret 
Harte; and others were elected after I was — E. A. 
Abbey, Lawrence Barrett, John Hay, Clarence King, 
and Ho wells. Its membership included a few art- 
ists, but a large majority were men of letters, many 
of whom were scholars, as the three volumes of the 
'Recreations of the Rabelais Club* amply prove. 
These recreations were the leaflets prepared by 
different members on different occasions to place by 
the sides of the plates at the dinner-table. Some- 
times they were satiric fragments of lost books by 
the Master; and sometimes they were co-operative 
exhibitions of the scholarly skill of half-a-dozen 
members joining forces for the occasion. For exam- 
ple, for one of our dinners the present Sir Frederick 
Pollock wrote a brief stanza in German in praise 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 283 

of Beethoven's symphonies, which Samuel Lee 
turned into Latin, from which ancient tongue 
Besant rendered it into English that George Saints- 
bury might put it into Greek and Palmer into Arabic. 
At another dinner a single leaflet contained a couplet 
and a quatrain signed only with the initial H, which 
concealed Lord Houghton, I think. This is the 
couplet: 

God gave Free Will to People and to Prince; 
And has been very sorry for it ever since. 

And this is the quatrain: 

On the Twelfth of September, one Sabbath morn, 
I shot a hen-pheasant, in standing corn, 
Without a license. Combine who can 
Such a cluster of crimes against God and man. 

For a third dinner Wigan and Pollock and I pre- 
pared a mock examination-paper designed to test 
a knowledge of the mysteries of the show-business 
in all its branches, opera and melodrama, con- 
juring and acrobatics; and I doubt if any one of 
the three members of the revived Rosicrucian 
Brotherhood could have passed it, while the rest of 
the Rabelaisians must have been surprised to dis- 
cover that so many mysterious questions could be 
asked about objects unknown. That the test was 
rather stiff may be gaged from these sample queries : 

1. What is a tranko? 

2. Distinguish between a star and a vampire. What is 

the French name of the latter, and why? 



284 THESE MANY YEARS 

11. Describe the act known as the 'Courier of St. Peters- 
burg' in not more than twenty lines. Explain 
the name. 

13. What is a battoute? Describe the Barnum method 
of using it in connection with elephants. 

15. 'Pete Jenkins.' Explain this name. 

When it was announced that Oliver Wendell 
Holmes was going to make his second visit to Europe 
in 1886, at the ripe age of seventy-seven — he had 
been born in the same year with Poe and Gladstone 
and Lincoln — an invitation was at once cabled to 
him to dine with the Rabelais, of which he was an 
early member. And the dinner took place on June 
6; it was the largest and the most distinguished 
of all the Rabelaisian banquets, and the only one 
at which there was any speaking, for the British 
members wanted to hear how the Autocrat of the 
Breakfast-Table would acquit himself at a dinner- 
table. To me this dinner was made memorable 
by the presence of George Meredith, to whom Locker 
very kindly presented me and with whom I was 
about to have a talk that I should have been glad 
to record here, if dinner had not been announced 
almost as soon as we had shaken hands. 

We all felt it to be eminently fit and proper that 
a club named in honor of a humorist who was a 
physician should express its admiration for a physi- 
cian who was a humorist. Holmes himself seems to 
have had more doubts about his hosts than we 
Rabelaisians had about our guest. "I was afraid," 
so he wrote in the record of his hundred days in 
Europe, "that the gentlemen who met 

To laugh and shake in Rabelais' easy-chair 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 285 

might be more hilarious and demonstrative in their 
mirth than I, a sober New Englander in the super- 
fluous decade, might find myself equal to. But there 
was no uproarious jollity; on the contrary, it was a 
pleasant gathering of literary people and artists, who 
took their pleasure not sadly but serenely." 

I forget whether or not Leland was present at 
the dinner to Holmes. If he had seen the cordiality 
and the character of that gathering he might have 
been consoled for Browning's refusal to accept 
election to the Rabelais Club. "I have never got 
over Browning's declining," Leland wrote in a letter; 
"I want him to regret it. He will regret it if we 
progress as we are doing." And in another letter 
Leland declared that he wanted "the Rabelais 
to coruscate- — whiz, blaze, sparkle, fulminate, and 
bang!" And all these things it did simultaneously 
on the evening of the dinner to Holmes. Thereafter 
it revolved for a while like a catherine-wheel after 
the fireworks have spluttered out. 



CHAPTER XIII 
EARLY LONDON MEMORIES. II 



I BE GIN this record with the columnar, self- 
reliant capital letter to signify that there is 
no disguise in its egoisms," so Holmes declared 
on the first page of his account of the visit to Europe 
during which he was the guest of the Rabelais Club ; 
and no reader of this record of mine can now expect 
any attempt to disguise its egoisms. I talk about 
my elders and betters as often as I can, but none the 
less do my wandering recollections cluster around 
myself, however modestly I may seem to seek shelter 
behind others. Yet I do not tell all that I might 
about my own sayings and doings, or I should here 
set down in detail the circumstances of an inspection 
of the misshapen and inconveniently Gothic law- 
courts made under the kindly guidance of the late 
Sir Frederick Pollock; I should describe a Kinsmen 
breakfast at the Savile, when we welcomed Locker 
to our ranks; and I should dilate upon a dinner at 
the Garrick with J. Ashby-S terry to meet E. W. 
Godwin, the architect, and W. G. Wills, the very 
Irish author of the 'Charles I' in which Irving was 
so dignified and so pathetic. I should explain copi- 
ously the circumstances which led Rider Haggard 

286 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 287 

to ask me to put my name beside his on ' She,' which 
he was about to publish, and for which he hoped to 
be able to secure an American copyright if a citizen 
of the United States could claim to be its joint 
author; and I should report the speeches at the 
dinner given to Henry Irving on the 4th of July, 1883, 
on the eve of his first visit to America, a dinner over 
which Lord Coleridge presided most felicitously, 
and at which Lowell, then our representative in 
Great Britain, spoke in his happiest vein. 

Out of the flotsam and jetsam which the dark 
tides of Time deposit on the shallow shores of 
Memory, I clutch at the vision of a goodly company 
gathered in the private dining-room of the Savile 
when Gosse invited a group of his friends to do 
honor to Howells. Of our fellow-guests I can re- 
call with certainty only Thomas Woolner, the 
sculptor-poet, Austin Dobson, George Du Maurier, 
Thomas Hardy, and William Black. And I can 
rescue only two fleeting fragments of the talk. The 
first was a discussion of the reasons for the disappear- 
ance of revenge as a motive in fiction — a discussion 
which resulted in a general agreement that as men 
no longer sit up nights on purpose to hate other 
men, the novelists have been forced to discard that 
murderous desire to get even which had been a main 
spring of romance in less sophisticated centuries. 

Over the second topic there could be no general 
agreement, since it was a definition of the image 
called up in our several minds by the word forest. 
Until that evening I had never thought of forest 
as clothing itself in different colors and taking on 



288 THESE MANY YEARS 

different forms in the eyes of different men; but I 
then discovered that even the most innocent word 
may don strange disguises. To Hardy forest sug- 
gested the sturdy oaks to be assaulted by the wood- 
landers of Wessex; and to Du Maurier it evoked 
the trim and tidy avenues of the national domain 
of France. To Black the word naturally brought to 
mind the low scrub of the so-called deer-forests of 
Scotland; and to Gosse it summoned up a view of 
the green-clad mountains that towered up from the 
Scandinavian fiords. To Ho wells it recalled the 
thick woods that in his youth fringed the rivers 
of Ohio; and to me there came back swiftly the 
memory of the wild growths, bristling up unre- 
strained by man, in the Chippewa Reservation which 
I had crossed fourteen years before in my canoe trip 
from Lake Superior to the Mississippi. 

Simple as the word seemed, it was interpreted by 
each of us in accord with his previous personal 
experience. And these divergent experiences ex- 
changed that evening brought home to me as never 
before the inherent and inevitable inadequacy of 
the vocabulary of every language, since there must 
always be two partners in any communication by 
means of words, and the verbal currency passing 
from one to the other has no fixed value necessarily 
the same to both of them. If this uncertainty and 
this variableness is obvious in ordinary speech about 
ordinary things, it is intensified in all discussions of 
art. I doubt if any two theorists ever agreed on the 
exact content that each of them put into nature. 
Only the men of science have succeeded in casting 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 289 

out the personal equation and in achieving absolute 
exactness in their terminology. Horse-power and 
foot-tons and kilo-watts are instruments of precision, 
understandable by all who employ these terms; 
whereas classic and romantic, realistic and naturalistic 
are will-o'-the-wisps and chameleons, changing color 
while one looks at them. 

It was at this dinner given by Gosse to Howells 
that I first met William Black, and I think we came 
together again once or twice at one or another of 
the gatherings of The Kinsmen. Altho we were 
never intimate, we were friendly enough at our 
few meetings. In my surprise at the unwarranted 
attack which Black made on Mrs. Pennell when she 
failed to find in his beloved Scotland the marvellous 
sunsets he delighted in depicting, I was moved to 
express in print my regret that "a British novelist 
had been discourteous to an American lady." I 
did not mention Black by name; but the cap fit 
and he promptly put it on, as I learned when his 
next novel was in course of serial publication, some 
one calling my attention to a caricature in its pages 
which was plainly tagged with a contortion of my 
name, "Professor Maunder Bathos." If it had not 
been for the indisputable label, I might have failed 
to find my own features in this highly colored por- 
trait done from a distance. So keen was the carica- 
turist's own enjoyment in his own creation that he 
introduced it again into a later tale, as I have been 
informed. I may note also that Edward Eggleston 
told me that he had used me as the model for one 
of the least important characters in a New York 



290 THESE MANY YEARS 

novel; and this time I could only appreciate the 
kindly compliment, the likeness not striking me as 
instantly recognizable. 



II 

One object of my visits to London in 1881 and 1883 
was to enlarge and to verify the information I had 
been collecting for years for a biography of Richard 
Brinsley Sheridan — information which I utilized 
in my edition of the 'Rivals' and the 'School for 
Scandal,' published in 1884. In 1881 Dobson 
gave me a letter of introduction to the librarian at 
the South Kensington Museum who was in charge 
of the Dyce-Forster collection, and who told me at 
once that he had a bundle of loose MSS. which 
seemed to relate to Sheridan. It did not take a 
long examination to disclose that these indigested 
notes were the work of the hireling scribe engaged 
to do the drudgery of research by the Dr. Watkins 
who had brought out two hasty and none too favor- 
able volumes on Sheridan's career shortly after the 
death of the dramatist. 

It was perhaps the careful search thru these unre- 
lated and unimportant scribblings which led me to 
perceive that Moore had used Watkins far more 
often than he was willing to admit, and that he 
took every occasion to controvert the statements 
made by his predecessor, whom he sedulously re- 
frained from mentioning in his own more wittily 
written biography. As a result of this desire to 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 291 

discredit Watkins, Moore had failed to profit by 
all the facts that the earlier biographer supplied. 
And it was by piecing together information gleaned 
from Moore and Watkins both, and by interpreting 
their apparent contradictions, that I was enabled to 
solve what had hitherto been the great mystery of 
Sheridan's career. The solution which I put forth 
tentatively in 1884, has been accepted by all Sheri- 
dan's later biographers. 

But I was not satisfied with what I could find in 
the Dyce-Forster collection and in the British Mu- 
seum, altho in the latter I was able to read the manu- 
script of the very early farce-burlesque ' Jupiter,' 
in which Sheridan had collaborated with his friend 
Halhed, as well as to go over a then unpublished 
comedy, 'A Trip to Bath,' preserved in the hand- 
writing of its author, Mrs. Frances Sheridan, the 
mother of the author of the 'Rivals.' I wanted 
also to hold in my hands the materials which the 
family had confided to Moore when he undertook 
his biography. 

I knew that Sheridan's great-grandson, Lord 
Dufferin, was then in London; and I hoped that he 
might recall me as the writer of an article on the 
' School for Scandal ' published in an American maga- 
zine, in 1877, one hundred years after the first per- 
formance, which I had sent to him at the time, 
he being then governor-general of Canada. And 
to him I wrote again in 1883„ requesting access to 
the Sheridan papers. In his courteous reply he 
asked me to call on him and suggested that I should 
apply direct to his uncle, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. 



292 THESE MANY YEARS 

When I paid him a visit by appointment he told me 
that all the family papers were in the possession 
of his uncle, who lived at Frampton Court, and to 
whom he had forwarded my request. 

A day or two later there came a cordial invitation 
from the grandson and namesake of Sheridan to 
run down to Dorchester in the heart of the Wessex 
that I knew only from Hardy's novels. We spent 
the night at a very Hardyesque inn at Dorchester, 
and went to Frampton Court for luncheon, when we 
found two other Americans, the daughter-in-law of 
the host and her sister, daughters of John Lothrop 
Motley. It was a beautiful day early in July and 
the lovely gardens were enticing; but while the rest 
of the party were strolling here and there under the 
trees I was secluded in the library turning over the 
few important manuscripts, letters, and documents 
that the family had recovered from Moore. From 
these I did not derive so much profit as from the well- 
nourished conversation of the host, who was intensely 
loyal to his grandfather's much-maligned memory, 
and who was helpful to the inquirer from across the 
Atlantic. I had a later letter from Mr. Sheridan in- 
forming me that by the death of his sister, Lady 
Sterling Maxwell (better known as the Honorable 
Mrs. Norton), he had come into possession of three 
large copy-books containing what appeared to be a 
first draft of the 'School for Scandal.' All the 
unpublished material in the hands of the different 
members of the Sheridan family was placed at the 
disposal of W. Fraser Rae when he was preparing 
the ample biography in which the dramatist-orator 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 293 

was first presented in proper proportion and in his 
true colors. 

My own biography was little more than an out- 
line sketch, and it dealt more especially with his 
work as a comic dramatist. It was prepared as an 
introduction to the two five-act comedies, which 
were then for the first time supplied with notes 
elucidating a few of the many eighteenth-century 
allusions and pointing out the possible sources of 
certain passages. The illustrations had been drawn 
for Scribner's Monthly to accompany earlier articles 
of mine. Robert Blum provided dazzling pen-and- 
ink sketches of Jefferson as Bob Acres and of Mrs. 
Drew as Mrs. Malaprop; and C. S. Reinhart repre- 
sented John Brougham as Sir Lucius, as incomparable 
in that character as Mrs. Drew was in the other. 
E. A. Abbey supplied portraits of John Gilbert 
as Sir Peter and of Charles Coghlan as Charles; 
and here again I am inclined to believe that never 
have these two parts been more truthfully and more 
richly impersonated. Abbey also provided a charm- 
ing drawing of Mrs. G. H. Gilbert as Mrs. Candour 
— a character in which that otherwise admirable 
actress might have been expected to shine, but in 
which, oddly enough, she never appeared to ad- 
vantage. 

To round out my collection of leading actors of 
the present in leading parts of the past, I needed a 
Lady Teazle and a Joseph Surface. At my request 
Henry Irving and Ellen Terry were good enough to 
get out the costumes in which they had impersonated 
these opposing characters and to sit to Frederick 



294 THESE MANY YEARS 

Barnard, who made me a most effective drawing, 
representing Lady Teazle rising from her chair, 
leaving the plausible Joseph still seated and look- 
ing up at her hopefully. When I next saw Irving 
I seized the chance to thank him for his kindness in 
going to all the trouble of costuming himself and of 
posing, and of persuading Miss Terry to the same 
effort. He waved that aside, saying lightly: "That's 
of no importance. But what is important is that 
your illustration will mislead all the future his- 
torians of the English stage on a wild-goose chase to 
find out when it was that she and I appeared to- 
gether as Lady Teazle and as Joseph. And they are 
doomed to disappointment, for altho she has been 
Lady Teazle often and I used frequently to be Jo- 
seph, we have never played these parts with each 
other — and what is more to the point, we never 
shall. If I ever revive the 'School for Scandal' at 
the Lyceum, Ellen Terry will be Lady Teazle, of 
course, but I shall be Sir Peter." 

Then he told me an anecdote of an all-star revival 
of Sheridan's masterpiece at Drury Lane for a bene- 
fit in which the aid was enlisted of all the sexagena- 
rian and octogenarian celebrities of the stage who 
emerged from their long-earned retirement "for this 
occasion only" — Helen Faucit, Benjamin Webster, 
Mrs. Sterling, Buckstone, Compton, Farren and the 
rest, Irving being almost the only one in the cast 
who was under fifty. Lady Burdett-Coutts sub- 
scribed for a row of seats and gave two tickets to two 
aged ladies who rarely had the pleasure of theater- 
going. And when their benefactress asked them if 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 295 

they had enjoyed the performance, they replied: 
"Oh, yes, my lady, thank you very much. But we 
did hate to see such a lot of wicked old people trying 
to get the better of that good young man, Joseph !" 



Ill 

At the end of September, 1883, I received a note 
from Walter Pollock, telling me that the editor of the 
Saturday Review had resigned and that he was 
thereafter to be in charge of the paper; and he 
wanted me to become a contributor to its columns. 
I accepted the invitation, and during the eleven 
years of Pollock's editorship I wrote frequently 
for the Saturday, most frequently when I was 
in London for the summer, but also occasionally 
when I was at home in New York, reviewing Amer- 
ican books and criticising the plays performed in 
the New York theaters. My first article gave an ac- 
count of the visits of various British actors to the 
United States, a topic timely in the fall of 1883, when 
Henry Irving was about to come to America for the 
first time. 

The Saturday Review was then the property of its 
founder, A. J. B. Beresford-Hope; and Pollock was 
the third editor in its less than thirty years of life. 
Its editorial office was in the Albany, where it oc- 
cupied G 1, a little set of rooms on the ground floor, 
looking out on Vigo Street. The tradition of mystery 
still lingered in its management; the contributors 
were even supposed not to know one another; 



296 THESE MANY YEARS 

and when we visited the editor we were shown into 
one or another of the tiny rooms wherein we waited 
in solitude until the coast was clear for us to approach 
the editor without danger of meeting some other 
member of the staff in the short, dark hall. It 
seemed to me that this affectation of secrecy was a 
little absurd; especially did it seem so when I first 
attended one of the annual fish-dinners at Greenwich 
which the proprietor was in the habit of giving every 
summer to all his contributors. I was present at 
two of these very agreeable gatherings, in June, 
1885, and in July, 1886; and I think the second of 
these was the last occasion when the large body of 
Saturday Reviewers had the privilege of beholding 
themselves in mass. 

I find that I have preserved not only the invita- 
tions and the bills-of-fare of these banquets, but also 
one of the seating plans with the names of the guests, 
nearly threescore and ten; and I suppose that this 
is a list more or less complete of those who were then 
contributors to the London weekly which was still 
a power in British politics. I read the names of 
Arthur Balfour and of James Bryce, but I am 
inclined to believe that they had ceased to write 
before I began. The assistant editor was George 
Saintsbury; and among the most frequent writers 
were Lang, Dobson, Gosse, Wigan, H. D. Traill, 
David Hannay, William Hunt, Herbert Stephen, W. 
E. Henley, Richard Garnett and the editor's brother, 
the present Sir Frederick Pollock. E. A. Freeman 
had only recently withdrawn from the Saturday for 
political reasons, after having been an assiduous con- 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 297 

tributor for a quarter of a century; and his friend, 
John Richard Green, for years a most volumi- 
nous writer in its columns, had died in 1883. Altho 
Green was primarily a historian, he was also a very 
versatile man in his tastes, dashing off sparkling 
articles on social topics; and I was informed by one 
of his intimates that most of the somewhat sensa- 
tional papers on the "Girl of the Period," which 
had enlivened the pages of the Saturday in the late 
sixties, were due to Green and not to Mrs. Lynn 
Lynton, who was generally credited with their 
authorship. 

As I glance down the seating plan I am reminded 
that I sat between Wigan and W. R. Ralston, the 
leading British authority on Russian literature; 
and in the course of our conversation I referred to a 
review bearing his signature which I had read in 
the Academy and which praised a recent American 
book on the epic songs of Russia, and I added that I 
had been patriotically pleased to find equally lauda- 
tory comments on this volume in the Athenaeum 
and in the Saturday. Ralston smilingly told me that 
he was responsible for those two anonymous reviews 
of this American book as well as for his signed article. 
"I did not want to write about it three times," he 
explained, "but I felt that I ought to do so, since 
there is nobody else here who takes any great inter- 
est in Russian literature. It was a good piece of 
work, that American book; and if I had refused to 
write those reviews it would have had to go without 
notice — which did not seem to me quite fair to the 
author." It struck me then that it was fortunate 



298 THESE MANY YEARS 

for the author that Ralston had taken so favorable 
a view of the volume; but I also reflected that anony- 
mous reviewing might readily put it in the power of 
a personal enemy to attack a writer from the ambush 
of half-a-dozen different journals. 

The Saturday Review was not hospitable to out- 
siders; and I doubt if the editors even examined the 
voluntary offerings which might be sent in. The 
theory was that the paper had a sufficient, a complete, 
a regular staff, who had been invited and who had 
been tested by time. The editor had such confi- 
dence in his associates that he did not even read 
their articles until these came back to him from the 
printer in galley-proof. Of course, he had to ar- 
range his table of contents for every number and to 
distribute his timely topics, so as to avert repetition 
and to secure variety. Generally I submitted the 
subject of any paper I proposed to prepare; but when 
I was three thousand miles away I sometimes went 
ahead and sent in my article without previous 
authorization. And I may confess frankly now that 
it was great fun for me, an American of the Ameri- 
cans, to say my say about American topics in the 
columns of the most British of British periodicals. 
About American politics I rarely expressed any 
opinion because that topic had been for years in the 
care of one of the oldest contributors to the paper, 
altho his long service had not equipped him with 
knowledge of the subject. Pollock called my atten- 
tion once to an article on American affairs in the 
current number and wondered whether it was not all 
at sea in its opinions; and I had to answer that I 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 299 

had counted fifteen misstatements of fact in the 
first column, whereupon he shrugged his shoulders 
and explained that he was powerless, since he had 
inherited that contributor from the preceding editors. 
I was told, altho I forget by whom, that the ancient 
light who thus devoted his mind to the misunder- 
standing of American politics was G. S. Venables, 
otherwise unknown to fame except as the man who 
had broken Thackeray's nose. 

I think that not a few of the British readers of the 
Saturday Review may have been a little surprised 
by an article of mine, early in 1884, on "England in 
the United States,' in which I tried to analyze the 
American attitude toward Great Britain; and cer- 
tainly one American reader of the paper was struck 
by it, since it was taken as a text for an easy-chair 
essay by George William Curtis, who never suspected 
it to be the work of a fellow New Yorker. 

During the first Cleveland campaign, I prepared 
a paper on 'Mugwumps,' elucidating the immediate 
meaning of that abhorrent word, which had been 
totally misinterpreted in England, Lang having even 
gone so far as to rime a ballade with the refrain, 
"The mugwump never votes," whereas the main 
objection to him on the part of the persistent parti- 
sans was that he always voted. This article led to 
another in which I explained for the benefit of the 
distant islanders a handful of other 'Political Ameri- 
canisms.' And in 1886, when the late R. A. Proctor, 
who made a specialty of science, but who carried 
omniscience as a side-line, began to publish in Know- 
ledge an ill-informed essay on Americanisms, I took 



300 THESE MANY YEARS 

delight in pointing out certain of his blunders, arous- 
ing him to violent wrath and also to a belief that the 
corrections had been made by Grant Allen, who was 
forced at last to appeal to the editor of the Saturday 
for a formal letter exonerating him from the accusa- 
tion. 

Pollock left me a wide choice of themes and he 
printed everything that I sent him, excepting only 
one or two minor papers in which my nativity was 
perhaps too plainly disclosed. More than once he 
confided to me for review books of American author- 
ship which I found I did not esteem highly, and these 
I always returned, as I was unwilling to say any- 
thing in dispraise of any fellow-countryman when I 
was writing anonymously in a British weekly, none 
too friendly toward the United States. On the 
other hand, I seized every opportunity to praise the 
American authors in whose works I delighted; and 
I was glad to acclaim the high quality of 'Huckle- 
berry Finn' and of the 'Rise of Silas Lapham' 
when these two masterpieces originally appeared. 
And I had also earlier discussed at length the 'Bread- 
Winners,' the authorship of which was then a secret 
known only to a few. One of those who knew was 
Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of the magazine 
in which the story had appeared as a serial; and when 
he happened to mention to me the review in the 
Saturday, I made no mystery of the fact that I was 
responsible for it. Within a week I chanced to 
pass John Hay on Broadway and he waved his usual 
friendly greeting, then he suddenly stopped and 
hailed me for a minute's chat. And I was confirmed 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 301 

in my conviction that he was indeed the author of 
the ' Bread- Winners. ' 

In 1894 Beresford-Hope sold the Saturday Review; 
Pollock ceased to be its editor; and the old staff 
ceased to contribute. It passed into alien hands and 
its glory departed forever. It lost its distinctive 
character, once for all, and it became merely one 
among many London weeklies, only superficially 
to be distinguished from each other. Upon papers 
like the Nation and the Saturday Review there is 
impressed the forceful personality of their founders, 
and to a certain extent that of the original staff 
whom the founder recruited among congenial souls; 
and when these founders die or retire, the papers are 
likely to lose their individuality soon, and in time 
their reputation. They may retain their names to 
all eternity, but the virtue has gone out of them; 
and they are but the empty shell of the rockets that 
earlier soared aloft in coruscating glory. 

IV 

It was, I think, in 1881, altho it might not have 
been until 1883, that I became acquainted with 
Charles H. E. Brookfield, who was a great friend of 
Walter Pollock's and a fellow-member of the Savile. 
Brookfield was a character-comedian with an unusual 
gift for suggesting varied types, partly by ingenious 
make-up and partly by assumption of manner. It 
cannot be held, however, that he was an actor of 
high rank, for he could not carry a play on his own 
shoulders, and he was better in what are known on 



302 THESE MANY YEARS 

the stage as "bits" than in more strenuous parts. 
He was a member of the Bancrofts' admirable com- 
pany at the Hay market, where I saw him once as 
Baron Stein in 'Diplomacy,' the very British per- 
version of Sardou's 'Dora.' One summer when the 
Bancrofts were about to close the house, Brookfleld 
subleased it for a season of his own, having found a 
friendly backer. "Angels," so it is said, rush in 
where fools fear to tread; and I doubt if the financial 
rewards of this summer season were as ample as 
the improvised manager had hoped. 

Brookfleld had a pretty wit of his own, and his 
clever sayings were current in London club circles. 
One of them, almost the only one that I now re- 
member, was uttered the winter after his venture 
into management. One evening in the greenroom of 
the Haymarket, the "old woman" of the company 
was belauding the beauty of Mrs. Bancroft's hair, 
whereupon Brookfleld went up to a mirror and 
arranged his own locks lovingly, remarking audibly: 
"My hair has also been much admired." And the 
old woman sharply inquired: "Pray by whom, Mr. 
Brookfleld?" To which the ex-manager responded 
nonchalantly: "Oh, by my company — in the sum- 
mer season." 

It must have been one afternoon in the summer of 
1883, when Brookfleld and Pollock and I were 
chatting after luncheon in the smoking-room of 
the Savile, that the talk turned upon 'Vanity Fair.' 
Brookfleld remarked to me very casually: "My 
mother has a lot of Thackeray letters." When I 
asked for particulars, he explained that his parents 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 303 

had been very intimate with the novelist, and that 
his mother had preserved nearly a hundred letters 
to them extending over long years, and often adorned 
with characteristic drawings. When I inquired 
why this correspondence had not been printed, he 
replied that his mother had offered them without suc- 
cess to the London publisher who was the owner 
of the Thackeray copyrights. I knew that the 
law, laid down by the English court when Chester- 
field protested against the publication of his letters 
to his son, admitted the physical ownership of a 
letter by the recipient while reserving to the sender 
the right to control publication; and I saw that the 
situation was a deadlock since Mrs. Brookfield could 
not sell her letters for publication without the per- 
mission of the owner of Thackeray's copyrights, 
whereas the publisher could not issue the corre- 
spondence unless she supplied him with the copy. 

When Charley Brookfield went on to tell me that 
Miss Thackeray (now Lady Ritchie) had written to 
his mother a cordial approval of any publication 
Mrs. Brookfield might desire, I saw no reason why 
Thackeray's letters should not make their first ap- 
pearance in the United States, where there was no 
recognition of the exclusive ownership of any British 
copyright; and I suggested that I should be glad to 
offer the correspondence to an American publisher, 
if the Brookfields would like me to do so. Charley 
thanked me and said he would convey my proposal 
to his mother. 

Two or three times later in that summer of 1883 
I asked Brookfield about the Thackeray letters ; and I 



304 THESE MANY YEARS 

always received the same response — that his mother 
was arranging the correspondence. In the fall I 
came back to New York for the winter; and in the 
spring of 1884 I went over to London again. As 
soon as I saw Brookfield in the Savile I once more 
inquired about the correspondence; and he returned 
an answer as before — that his mother was at work 
upon the letters. I returned home again in the fall, 
having heard nothing further. Then most unex- 
pectedly in March, 1885, I received a cable message: 
"Advise publication Thackeray letters. Brookfield, 
Hay market." 

Thus authorized I went to Charles Scribner's 
Sons and explained the situation ; and they told me 
promptly that if the correspondence was as charac- 
teristic as I believed it to be, they would gladly 
acquire it. They suggested that copies of a few 
representative letters should be sent to them for 
examination. When I reported this to Brookfield I 
received a charming letter from his mother, which I 
showed to the publishers, who thereafter negotiated 
with her directly, my labors as an intermediary being 
no longer necessary. 

James Russell Lowell, one of the few survivors of 
Thackeray's friends, was persuaded to go over the 
correspondence and select those letters most suitable 
for publication. Fortified by Lowell's assistance 
and by Miss Thackeray's letter of approbation, the 
New York publishers approached the London pub- 
lisher who controlled the Thackeray copyrights; 
and they were able to arrive at an arrangement 
whereby the letters chosen by Lowell appeared seri- 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 305 

ally in the opening numbers of Scribner's Magazine, 
issued simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. 
When at last the correspondence appeared in a vol- 
ume, it revealed for the first time the high position 
that Thackeray was entitled to take among English 
letter-writers; and it confirmed the impression of 
sweetness and of strength, of kindliness and of cour- 
age, which earlier could have been only deduced 
from his more formal works. 

That portion of the correspondence which Lowell 
had selected was acquired by Augustin Daly, and 
after his death it found a permanent resting-place 
in the collection of autographs and manuscripts 
gathered by the late J. P. Morgan. Those letters 
which Lowell in his discretion thought it wiser not 
to publish in 1886, also came to America after 
Mrs. Brookfield's death. They were long a precious 
possession of the most ardent and devoted collector 
of Thackerayana, Major Lambert, of Philadelphia; 
and at his death they were sold at auction one by 
one and scattered far and wide. 



Altho I found at the Savile more men of my own 
age and of my own interests, I was glad to be a guest 
also of the Athenaeum, where Locker caused me to be 
invited in 1881, 1883, and 1884. To bestow on a 
young American man of letters the privilege of stroll- 
ing thru the spacious and lofty halls of the most 
dignified of London clubs was like conferring on him 
the power of beholding many of the men who had 



306 THESE MANY YEARS 

made the intellectual history of England. I used 
to see Cardinal Manning consulting the catalog in 
the silent library, and to gaze at Herbert Spencer 
playing billiards in the subterranean vault excavated 
under the garden in the rear to provide a pair of 
little rooms for the smokers, who were not then per- 
mitted to indulge their fondness for the weed above 
ground. I lunched at the Athenaeum once with 
Lang to meet Robertson Smith, the Orientalist who 
was then engaged in editing the Encyclopedia Bri- 
tannica. 

Locker introduced me to Matthew Arnold, who 
consented to propose me for membership; and I 
may remark that the waiting-list was then so long 
that my name was not reached for eighteen years; 
thus it was only in 1901 that I had the pleasure of 
receiving notice of my election. When we returned 
home in the Servia in October, 1883, 1 was delighted 
to discover that Arnold was a fellow-passenger on 
that first visit to the America which interested him 
so keenly that he tried hard to understand it. I 
cherish the memory of the several protracted walks 
on the deck of the ship in the course of the voyage 
whereby I was enabled better to appreciate the 
engaging simplicity of his character. I was pres- 
ent at his opening lecture in New York, when his 
inexperience in public speaking made him almost 
inaudible to the majority of the audience; and I 
should like to testify here to the courtesy of my 
fellow-citizens toward a man whom they admired, 
proved by the fact that those who had come to hear 
remained seated to the end in the attitude of atten- 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 307 

tion, altho they were able only now and again to 
guess at the trend of his discourse. 

It was Locker also who made me acquainted with 
Alfred Ainger, the biographer of Lamb, and one of 
the wittiest and most charming of conversationalists. 
He was a friend of George Smith, the senior partner 
of Smith, Elder & Co., the publishers of the Corn- 
hill, the magazine that Thackeray had started a 
score of years earlier, that Leslie Stephen had edited, 
and that had then been taken in hand by James 
Payn, with a consequent reduction both in its price 
and of its quality, much to the disgust of Ainger, 
who had an affectional regard for the monthly as it 
had been from the beginning. Ainger knew that 
Smith was also the chief proprietor of the Apollinaris 
Company and of the Aylesbury Dairy; and this 
moved him in his disappointment at the downfall 
of his favorite magazine to send to its publisher this 
merry jest: "To George Smith, proprietor of the 
Aylesbury Dairy, of the Apollinaris Company, and 
of the Cornhill Magazine: 

The force of nature could no farther go; 

To form the third, she joined the other two." 

One reason why the waiting-list of the Athenaeum 
was so long was because the aged members found 
the club a haven of rest, so quiet that "few died and 
none resigned." Octogenarians were common and 
nonagenarians were less uncommon within its walls 
than anywhere else. This protracted longevity of 
the members of the Athenaeum was brought home to 



308 THESE MANY YEARS 

me one chilly evening in 1883 when Pollock dined 
with me and when we were joined by Palgrave 
Simpson, the playwright, best recalled now by his 
adaptation of the 'Scrap of Paper' from Sardou's 
'Pattes de Mouche.' After dinner we went down to 
the tiny smoking-room, dug out of the bowels of the 
earth, and we took chairs in front of the little fire- 
place, not noting whether or not there were other 
members in the seats which ran along the walls on 
three sides. Of course we talked about the stage 
and we came in time to consider the historic accu- 
racy of stage costumes. I ventured to express my 
belief that Talma had been the first performer to 
garb a Roman of old in a flowing toga; this had been 
designed for him by David, and it demanded that he 
should don sandals on his otherwise bare feet. And 
I added the anecdote of the actress of the Frangais, 
who was so shocked by this departure from the 
traditional-costume long familiar to her in the 
theater that she cried out when her eyes fell on the 
actor's naked foot: "Fie, Talma, you look like an 
antique statue !" 

Then most unexpectedly a voice from an unseen 
man behind us broke in: "That may be all very well. 
But the last time I saw Talma he played Hamlet in 
Hessian boots !" 

Now, Talma had died in 1826; and here was an 
Englishman telling us in 1883 that he had seen 
the French actor more than once. Who was this 
belated survivor ? Who could he have been ? Nei- 
ther Pollock nor Simpson recognized the voice; 
and we did not deem it polite to demand his name. 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 309 

In this second decade of the twentieth century the 
fact that I have been in the same room with some 
one recalling that he had seen an actor who died in 
the third decade of the nineteenth century, seems to 
link me more closely with the distant past. It was 
an experience highly characteristic of the Athenaeum. 
And I may comment here, more than thirty years 
after this experience, that I think the memory of the 
owner of this unknown voice had betrayed him, and 
that it was not in 'Hamlet' but in the now forgotten 
'Stranger' that Talma wore Hessian boots. 

On a hot evening in July, 1884, I dropped into the 
Athenaeum to dine. It was getting late in the sea- 
son, and the long dining-room was almost deserted, 
there being in it only two men at opposite ends of 
the hall. After I had given my order, one of these 
started to go out; it was Palgrave Simpson; he came 
over to me for a few words, and then went to the 
other solitary diner. In a moment he returned and 
said to me: " That is Lord Houghton over there. He 
is all alone this evening; and when I told him that 
you were an American, he wanted to know whether 
you would not like to take your dinner at his table ? " 
Of course I accepted with alacrity. Simpson took 
me over to Lord Houghton, introduced me, and left 
us. I knew Lord Houghton as the biographer of 
Keats, as the ardent advocate of a more adequate 
copyright protection for authors, and as the stanch 
friend of the Union during the Civil War. I had 
seen him when he came to America in 1875, and I 
had been introduced to him by Locker the summer 
before in the Travellers Club, a fact which I did not 



310 THESE MANY YEARS 

expect him to recall. He was then just seventy- 
five, but his vivacity was undimmed by years; and 
his friendliness of welcome to a young stranger from 
beyond the seas was undisguised. 

I asked him if he ever intended to cross the At- 
lantic to see us once more; and he answered that his 
friends told him his best poem was 'Never Again.' 
He informed me that he had been one of the five 
members of the House of Commons who stood up 
for the North during the Civil War, two of the others 
being John Bright and Forster; and that he had 
always advocated cultivating the friendship of the 
United States. Then, perhaps in humorous explana- 
tion of his desire for amity between his country and 
mine, he drew attention to his own resemblance to 
the portraits of George Washington — certainly 
striking so far as the upper half of the head was con- 
cerned. He declared that Americans were then so 
popular in London society that Henry James had 
expressed dread of a reaction which might bring 
about a Yankee-Hetze in England as fierce as the 
Juden-Hetze in Germany. He relished the writings 
of certain American authors, Cable's 'Old Creole 
Days' in particular and Mrs. Burnett's 'Louisiana.' 
He said that Tennyson had commended to him Mrs. 
Burnett's short-story 'Surly Tim' and that Hallam 
Tennyson offered to read it aloud to them, with the 
warning that his father would surely break down at 
one part. And at the pathetic point in the little 
tale Tennyson did break down, the tears rolling from 
his eyes. 

In the course of our two hours' talk I chanced 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 311 

to mention that Charley Brookfield was persuading 
his mother to publish the letters that Thackeray 
had written to her and to his father. Lord Houghton 
said that he had always understood that Mrs. 
Brookfield was the original of the heroine of 'Hen- 
ry Esmond,' — an understanding confirmed when 
Thackeray's letters to her were printed three years 
later. He informed me that the Brookfields were 
among Thackeray's oldest and most intimate friends, 
and that at one time Brookfield had been very jealous 
of Thackeray. "But don't say I told you so!" he 
added suddenly; and I should not venture to set 
this down here if the fact had not been made plain 
by the letters to the Brookfields which were sup- 
pressed by Lowell, only to become public property 
when the second half of the correspondence was 
scattered abroad after Major Lambert's death. 

VI 

In those successive summers in London I went 
far more often to the Savile than to the Athenaeum; 
and among those whom I came to know at the 
younger club was William Ernest Henley. Already 
in 1878 Austin Dobson had told me of the ballades 
and other French forms which Henley was writing 
in a weekly called London, then edited by him. 
Dobson also informed me that London was printing 
a series of strange tales, called the 'New Arabian 
Nights,' written by a very clever young Scotchman, 
Robert Louis Stevenson. I looked up the publica- 
tion-offices of London in some squalid side street, 



312 THESE MANY YEARS 

and I secured a lot of the back numbers, in which I 
read Stevenson's fiction and Henley's rimes, not 
being greatly taken with the latter, which seemed to 
me then and now also, to lack the brightness and 
lightness, the unpremeditated ease and the cer- 
tainty of stroke, which had charmed me in Dobson's 
ballades and villanelles. It is not in familiar verse 
that Henley was to make his mark as a poet — in 
so far as he did make his mark, — but in the sledge- 
hammer assertiveness of his intensely characteristic 

I am the master of my fate, 
I am the captain of my soul. 

In the early eighties I saw a good deal of Henley. 
I attended the solitary matinee at the Prince of 
Wales's Theater on July 2, 1884, when 'Deacon 
Brodie' was first tested in the fire of the footlights. 
I contributed myself (and I also procured other 
American contributions) to the Magazine of Art, 
which Henley was then editing; and I suggested to 
the editors of the Critic that Henley might be en- 
listed as their London correspondent. While this 
engagement was pending he wrote me: "I think 
I can manage the work, — provided always that I'm 
not asked to praise Gladstone and that I can say 
pretty much (within limits) what I please. I'd 
rather like to try my hand at it anyhow." He had 
the chance to try his hand at it and he was not asked 
to praise Gladstone; but his connection with the 
Critic was finally terminated mainly because Henley 
in the fury of his Tory partisanship could not re- 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 313 

frain from filling his letters with bitter abuse of 
Gladstone, abuse wholly out of place in the columns 
of an American periodical devoted to gentler arts 
than politics. 

This exuberance of animosity was just like Henley. 
He had no assured income; he did not form new 
connections easily; he needed the money from this 
correspondence; but he could not refrain from free- 
ing his soul in print, regardless of the editors who 
were employing him. He was radically uncompro- 
mising; and when Sidney Colvin got him the edi- 
torship of the Magazine of Art, it was with the ut- 
most difficulty that he was made to refrain from 
uttering in every issue his contempt for the crafts- 
manship of Gustave Dore, that prolific improviser 
in black and white, whose books were being pushed 
by the owners of the review in which Henley was 
urgent to abuse them. 

Henley was handicapped by physical disability; 
his mind was sturdier than his body. It was his 
misfortune also that in the land of his birth society 
is stratified, like a chocolate layer-cake, and that 
the man who is forceful enough to push himself up 
into a level above that in which he was born is likely 
to be made acutely conscious of his struggle in the 
ascent. Henley started on the lower rounds of the 
social ladder; he was self-educated, with yawning 
gaps in his equipment for criticism, and yet with 
superb self-confidence in the validity of his own 
insight. He lacked breeding; and he came to have 
a truculent swagger. Because he had been able to 
climb above the station in which he had been born, 



314 THESE MANY YEARS 

he despised those of his own class who had not been 
dowered with the ability and the energy needed for 
the upward effort; and he reacted from his humble 
origin, becoming the most violent of Tories and the 
most acrid contemner of Radicalism. But tho he 
might be a Tory of the strictest sect, he seems to 
have been always uneasily aware that he was not 
accepted as a gentleman; and this irked him and 
gave him a distaste for the gentler qualities in 
general. As a matter of fact, Henley was not a 
gentleman when judged either by the narrow defini- 
tion of the British or by the sounder standard of us 
Americans. In one of my later essays, I declared 
that a certain burly British critic "preferred Dick- 
ens, — because Thackeray was a gentleman"; and in 
the next letter I had from Lang he told me that he 
had recognized my '.allusion to Henley.' 

The surprising attack that Henley made upon the 
memory of Stevenson was exactly what might have 
been expected by any one who knew Henley's funda- 
mental honesty and his uneasy self-assertion. I 
doubt if Henley's article would have pained Steven- 
son as much as it did his admirers. After all, Steven- 
son was not a bad judge of character; and I think 
that even if he would have deplored Henley's atti- 
tude, he would understand it. I can see no excuse 
for Henley's attack on his friend's memory, but I can 
see the reason for it, clearly enough. There was 
danger that the more or less saintly R. L. S. painted 
by the careful and cautious hand of the cousin who 
had prepared the official biography might blot out 
the true R. L. S., very human and often erring, 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 315 

whom Henley had loved; and I can understand 
how he felt it a duty laid on him to snatch the 
halo from the hero's head. Quite possibly, Henley's 
honesty was more or less stimulated by his jealousy, 
that all the praise should go out to Stevenson and 
that he should be in danger of survival only as 
a hanger-on to the coat-tails of departed genius. 
When all is said and the account is closed, none 
of those who knew Henley in the early eighties 
could fail to feel that the article on Stevenson was 
in all its aspects completely characteristic of its 
author. As E. A. Abbey, whose acquaintance with 
Henley dated back almost as far as mine, said to 
me soon after the damnatory essay appeared: 
"Well, Henley stood it just as long as he could, — 
and then he simply had to let out. He couldn't 
keep it in another minute!" 

While I saw a good deal of Henley in those sum- 
mers in the eighties, I saw Stevenson only once, 
altho we had exchanged messages thru Henley. 
I knew that his health was frail and uncertain and 
that he rarely revisited the club; and I doubted 
whether I might ever stand face to face with him. 
Then on the afternoon of August 3, 1886, he dropped 
into the Savile quite unexpectedly. For most of the 
two hours that he stayed, the talk was general and 
I can recapture few fragments of it. As the after- 
noon wore on, the others dropped out until Steven 
son and I were left alone in the smoking-room. 
What I remember most vividly was the high appre- 
ciation of 'Huckleberry Finn' that he expressed, 
calling it a far finer work artistically than 'Tom 



316 THESE MANY YEARS 

Sawyer,' partly because it was a richer book mor- 
ally; and he wound up by declaring it to be the 
most important addition to the fiction of our lan- 
guage that had been made for ten years. 

Another book that we discussed he did not hold to 
be so important; this was my own 'Last Meeting,' 
a brief novel which ought to have been a long short- 
story. It had at the core of it a romantic idea which 
I still think to have enticing possibilities for a more 
romantic writer than myself — the idea that the 
villain, after having shanghaied the hero for a long 
voyage, on a sailing vessel, would journey to its next 
port, so that he might repeat his marine kidnapping. 
I had sent the book to Henley with a request that he 
might pass it on to Stevenson; and all the news I 
had had of it was contained in a single sentence of 
one of Henley's letters to me: "R. L. S. says he 
wishes he'd found the shanghaing himself." So 
when Stevenson and I were abandoned by the others 
he expressed at once his interest in my idea as it 
was expounded toward the end of the tale. "It 
is a fine idea for a story," he declared; "but when 
you had found that, you ought to have thrown away 
all the earlier part of the story and have written 
straight up to the effect which alone made it worth 
while." 

I knew that his words were golden; but honesty 
compelled me to confess that I had started with the 
fine idea and that if I had failed to lead up to it 
adequately, it was because I had mischosen my 
method. As a dramatist by inclination, I could 
never begin any narrative unless I knew exactly how 



EARLY LONDON MEMORIES 317 

it was going to turn out and unless I foresaw its 
devious windings. Stevenson's sole response was 
to say that it was a pity I had maltreated an effect 
worthy of a more appropriate handling. My blunder 
was in putting so purely romantic a motive in a 
more or less realistic setting of literary life in New 
York with its atmosphere of superabundant small- 
talk. Henley had written to me that the book 
"is dreadfully like your talk. Not that I don't 
like your talk; you know very well that I do. But 
talk is talk, and writing's writing, and both are best 
in their proper places" — and this has always 
seemed to me one of the shrewdest and soundest of 
Henley's criticisms. He went on with equal wit 
and wisdom to object to the "crackle of cleverness" 
in the conversations of my characters, which affected 
him "like the noise of an electric spark. I got 
tired of you and them, as I do of a high-tuned lunch 
at the Savile. I long for a few flashes of stupidity." 



CHAPTER XIV 
ADVENTURES IN PLAY-MAKING 



AT the very beginning of this personal narra- 
/-\ tive I remarked on the strangeness of the 
fact that I was not permitted to practise the 
profession for which my father had trained me and 
that I had never been able to attain a recognized 
position in the profession for which I had trained 
myself. From my youth up my strongest literary 
ambition was to write plays and to have the perilous 
pleasure of seeing them performed. I knew that 
the stern craft of play-making was far more difficult 
to acquire than the more relaxed art of novel-writing; 
I recognized that a more determined will was neces- 
sary to overcome the obstacles which bar the path of 
the dramatist, far more disagreeable than those which 
the novelist has to pass thru; and I was fully aware 
that the fate of a play may depend on the choice of 
the theater in which it is produced and on the 
choice of the company by which it is performed 
no less than upon the uncertain temper of the 
spectators who assemble to judge it. I was familiar 
with the element of sheer luck, of blind chance, which 
seems so often to decide the destiny of a play. I 
did not deny that the career of a dramatist was neces- 

318 



ADVENTURES IN PLAY-MAKING 319 

sarily an unending gamble, with the odds as heavily 
against him who essays it as those which must be 
accepted by the frequenter of Monte Carlo. 

None the less that was the career to which I aspired, 
aleatory as it might be. I admitted the difficulties 
and dangers of the calling, but they did not daunt 
me. I wanted to write plays, simply because that 
was what I enjoyed most. I had no desire to use 
the stage as a platform from which to preach; I 
was not charged with a message for which I sought 
the theater as a sounding-board; and I had no lofty 
ideals of the poetic drama. All I wanted was the 
privilege of writing plays, just for the fun of it, 
because I got more pleasure out of the long protracted 
gestation, out of invention and development and 
construction and adjustment, than I could find in 
any other form of literary labor. I might turn 
aside from the achieving of this ambition to criticize, 
to devise short-stories, even to elaborate more sub- 
stantial novels; but in my own eyes at least I was 
always potentially a playwright; and when I was 
telling a story, all unconsciously the shaping of this 
narrative was in accord with the severer principles of 
dramatic construction. 

As I look back over more than twoscore years of 
literary activity I am well aware that such reputa- 
tion as I may have won has been conquered in other 
fields than the drama; and I am no longer surprised 
when juvenile critics, cavilling at one of my declara- 
tions of the fundamental principles of the drama- 
turgic art, are moved to intimate that I can have had 
no personal experience as a practical playwright. 



320 THESE MANY YEARS 

It is a melancholy fact that nothing fades more 
swiftly or more totally from the memory of men than 
the piece which merely rounds out a fairly honorable 
existence on the boards, — nothing, that is, except 
the piece which has met with blank failure at the 
beginning. The name of a dead and damned play 
is simply sponged out of the minds even of those 
who have been present when it struggled vainly 
for the life that was denied it. 

So it is that I am not disappointed when very few 
even of my friends are aware that I have had half- 
a-dozen plays produced in New York and that two 
of these, 'A Gold Mine' and 'On Probation,' were 
acted all over the United States for several seasons, 
one by Nat. C. Goodwin and the other by Wm. H. 
Crane. While two out of the six were distinctly 
successful on the stage, even if they were not tumultu- 
ously triumphant, two others were less successful, 
perhaps on account of their own defects, and per- 
haps, as I confess I fondly prefer to believe, because 
of unfortunate circumstances connected with their 
several performances. The two remaining were one- 
act pieces, which attained to as considerable a popu- 
larity as is now possible to these diminutive dramas, 
the theatrical equivalents of the short-story. Partly 
because I have undertaken in these pages to cele- 
brate myself and am therefore bound to discuss 
my adventures and misadventures in the theater, 
and partly because I feel that in these stage experi- 
ences of mine there may be a latent moral for aspir- 
ing playwrights of a younger generation, I have 
no hesitation in here setting down succinctly some 



ADVENTURES IN PLAY-MAKING 321 

part of the brief history of these six plays of mine 
and also of a few others that never saw the light of 
the lamps. 

II 

In the mid-years of the nineteenth century the 
English-speaking stage was a thrall of the French 
theater; and no stigma attached to the adapting a 
Parisian play to Anglo-Saxon conditions without 
consulting the foreign author who had then no re- 
dress against this spoliation either in Great Britain 
or the United States. A very large proportion of the 
pieces signed by Dion Boucicault and by Tom Tay- 
lor were thus filched from the foreigner, altho both 
these British dramatists had proved their possession 
of the ability to write original plays of their own, 
decidedly superior in value to those they were ac- 
customed to borrow from the French. This levy- 
ing on the alien, this conveying of foreign comedies 
over into English without so much as a by-your- 
leave, was almost universal in the sixties and the 
seventies of the nineteenth century; and even W. S. 
Gilbert, who shrieked aloud in pain when 'H. M. S. 
Pinafore' was pirated in the United States, had no 
hesitation either in transposing Labiche's 'Chapeau 
de Paille d'ltalie' into the 'Wedding March,' to 
which he affixed his own signature, or in boasting 
of the profits of this exploit. 

It did not occur to me when I was in my 'teens 
that there was anything wrong in this lifting of plays 
from one language to another with no consideration 
of the rights of the original author. I was subdued 



322 THESE MANY YEARS 

to what I worked in; and in an earlier chapter I 
have told how I made two adaptations from the 
French, with no conviction of wrong-doing. These 
were both one-act pieces; and I have mentioned the 
single performance of 'Very Odd' by Stuart Robson 
in Indianapolis, and the many performances of ' Frank 
Wylde' by amateurs in New York and elsewhere. 

My next venture, undertaken in 1874, was more 
ambitious; it was a version of a play by Theodore 
Barriere, author of the long popular piece called 
in English the 'Marble Heart.' The original was 
in three acts; and I utilized a one-act comedy of 
Barriere' s to supply a fourth act. I called my 
piece 'Edged Tools' and I intended it for Daly's 
Theater, where another rather somber but very affect- 
ing play of Barriere's entitled 'Alixe' had won suc- 
cess, due in large part to the powerfully pathetic 
acting of Clara Morris in the name-part. I see 
now that the story of 'Edged Tools' was false, as 
well as artificial, and I am not surprised that Daly 
declined it in a letter which I have preserved, dated 
in May, 1874, and in which he said that he found my 
piece "admirably written, bright and crisp" but 
"not dramatic enough to carry the play thru." 
A little later the play was accepted for early pro- 
duction by an admirable old-school actress, Char- 
lotte Thompson, who had recently been remarkably 
successful in an adaptation of a German dramatiza- 
tion of 'Jane Eyre.' For one reason or another she 
postponed the performance of 'Edged Tools,' sick- 
ening me with deferred hope, until at last she retired. 
By that time the taste for French pieces of the type 



ADVENTURES IN PLAY-MAKING 323 

to which my adaptation belonged was rapidly pass- 
ing, and I think I had begun to suspect the fragility 
of the story and to be no longer anxious to see it 
acted. 

In those days I followed closely the Parisian stage, 
studying Sarcey's weekly review in the Temps and 
often consulting the criticisms in the Figaro and 
elsewhere. When a melodrama called the 'Officier 
de Fortune, ' based on the adventures and escapes of 
Baron Trenck, was produced at the Ambigu in 
Paris in 1874, my old schoolfellow at Charlier's, 
Henry French (son of the theatrical publisher, 
Samuel French, whose yellow-backed acting editions 
of the standard drama still sell by thousands) was 
speculating in plays; and he proposed to buy this 
piece for me to adapt. But before we could make an 
offer, the play was published and it was thereby 
deprived of all protection by our courts, as the law 
then stood. As soon as a copy of the piece reached 
New York I adapted it. I knew that one of its chief 
figures had been Frederick the Great and that the 
French authorities, dreading the possible political 
consequences of the appearance of a Prussian king 
on the Parisian stage, had insisted that this character 
should become an Elector of Bavaria. I ran hastily 
thru Carlyle's biography and I restored the great 
soldier to the play from which he had been exiled 
by the French censors. I made many other modifica- 
tions, condensing freely, since New York playgoers 
are less tolerant of prolixity than the Parisians. I 
passed over the manuscript to Henry French, who 
endeavored vainly to get it produced. Nearly 



SU THESE MANY YEARS 

three years later I was present at the first night of 
Daly's 'Princess Royal,' in April, 1877; and I 
recognized the 'Officier de Fortune.' I thought I 
also perceived traces of my own handiwork, espe- 
cially as Frederick the Great appeared frankly as 
himself and not disguised as a Bavarian. And a few 
years thereafter I was made certain of this when 
we were guests at one of Daly's midnight suppers in 
his office after the play. I took occasion to ask him 
if he had used as the basis of his 'Princess Royal' 
an adaptation he had received from Henry French. 
He admitted this at once; and then I told him that 
I was responsible for it. And his sole comment was : 
"Ah, I didn't know that." 

In the spring of 1878 Bunner and I collaborated 
in a very free rendering into English of a French 
farce, the 'Poudre d'Escampette,' which had been 
fairly successful at the Varietes in Paris a few years 
earlier. We called our piece 'Touch and Go'; and 
it was an example of what the Romans used to call 
contaminatio, because we had drawn upon another 
French farce for more than one situation which we 
adjusted as best we could into the plot of the 'Poudre 
d'Escampette.' We had written our piece with an 
eye single to my old friend, Harry Beckett, the low 
comedian of Wallack's, an excellent Bob Acres in 
the 'Rivals,' and an unsurpassable Harvey Duff 
in the 'Shaughraun.' Beckett was highly pleased 
with the uproarious fun of our farce and he accepted 
the play on the spot. But before he could start on 
his starring tour his health failed, and after a brief 
interval his death followed. 



ADVENTURES IN PLAY-MAKING 325 

Bunner and I offered our play to various managers 
and actors all in vain; and as Bunner playfully asked, 
"if the managers won't touch it how can the people 
go to see it?" Then its extravagant exuberance 
captivated John T. Raymond, who had solidly 
established himself as a star by his most felicitous 
Colonel Sellers in the very sketchy play that Mark 
Twain had made out of the 'Gilded Age.' Ray- 
mond persuaded his managers to make a contract 
with us and to pay us a part of the purchase price 
in advance, — the first money I ever earned by my 
work for the theater. This contract was signed in 
May, 1882; and as we came down the stairs of the 
manager's office one of us said: "Now a manager 
has touched it, we shall see soon whether the people 
will go." That, however, was something we were 
not to see, since 'Touch and Go' was never pro- 
duced. It was announced more than once; and I 
think that it even got into rehearsal; yet it did not 
make its appearance before the public, for reasons 
which I never ascertained, altho they were probably 
the result of a more cold-blooded analysis of the 
manuscript, an ordeal almost always fatal to a farce 
because its fundamental whimsicality will rarely 
support the touch of the scalpel or the test of the 
microscope. 

Only once again was I guilty of an adaptation. 
This was in March, 1889, at the end of Coquelin's 
first visit to the United States when he wanted to 
appear in a piece written in English. He said to me 
suddenly one day, "I'm going to cable to Paris for 
Dreyfus's 'Un Crane sous une Tempete,' and I want 



326 THESE MANY YEARS 

you to adapt it for me so that I can play it with 
Mrs. Booth." I told him that he need not send to 
Paris, as I already had all Dreyfus' s plays and that I 
should be very glad indeed to turn any of them into 
English for him. Coquelin's choice was very happy, 
since there are only two characters in the little piece 
and the heroine is so emotional and so voluble that 
the hero has never a chance to speak a single word. 
Coquelin could converse in English if he had to ; but 
he preferred to confine himself to French. Agnes 
Booth (the widow of Junius Brutus Booth, brother 
of Edwin Booth) was then the wife of John B. 
Schoeffel, who was a partner with Henry E. Abbey 
and Maurice Grau in the management of Coquelin's 
tour. She was the most brilliant actress of comedy 
then visible on the American stage. I called my 
translation the ' Silent System'; and at Coquelin's 
request I added to his part the few words of farewell 
which he desired to address to the American public 
on his departure for home. One picturesque incident 
of this performance must be duly registered here. 
The wife scolds the husband because he is late and 
because he has forgotten her birthday; and at the 
end he overwhelms her by producing from his pocket 
a jewel-box containing a bracelet, which is at once 
his excuse for his tardiness and his proof that he has 
not failed to remember her birthday. And Coquelin 
surprised Mrs. Booth by the gift of a beautiful brace- 
let which he had bought specially for her in recogni- 
tion of her kindness in playing the part with him. 



ADVENTURES IN PLAY-MAKING 327 



III 

In the fall of 1878 I wrote my first original play, 
a comedy-drama, ultimately entitled 'Margery's 
Lovers.' I wrote it for Lester Wallack, the only 
actor-manager in New York, in the hope that the 
attraction of the part I was devising for the actor 
might be potent enough to persuade the manager to 
produce it. Wallack was not a great actor, partly 
because he lacked intelligence and partly because he 
was deficient in taste. But he was an expert come- 
dian of indisputable authority over his public. I 
had seen him in all his best characters and I had 
admired him especially in 'Diplomacy' and in 'Ours,' 
— altho I recognized the accuracy of Harry Beckett's 
criticism of Wallack' s performance in the final act 
of this second piece — that he descended from light 
comedy to low comedy, only a little removed from 
clowning. 

The character I elaborated for Wallack in c Mar- 
gery's Lovers' seemed to me to possess the kind of 
theatrical effectiveness which would appeal to him 
and which he could bring out admirably. It was a 
man born lazy yet capable of vigorous action when 
he saw the necessity for it. He dawdles thru two 
acts, uttering all the clever things I could invent, 
suddenly waking up at the end of the second act 
when the younger hero finds himself unexpectedly in 
a dangerous situation; and therefore in the third act 
he is all activity in his successful effort to clear the 
character of his friend, relapsing just before the 



328 THESE MANY YEARS 

curtain finally falls into his former languor and 
lazily permitting the woman he has wooed to pro- 
pose to him. 

Wallack read the play as soon as I sent it to him, 
and he told me that he liked it very much. But he 
could not make up his mind to produce it; and after 
waiting eighteen months I withdrew the manuscript 
in spite of his surprised protest. I think that his 
hesitancy was due to the American authorship of 
the play. Wallack, altho he had been born here, 
was resolutely British all his days. It was said that 
he kept the Union Jack flying over his country home 
at Long Branch; and the same standard might as 
well have floated over his theater in New York. 
This, I think, was the cause of his final failure; he 
remained an alien in the city of his birth; and he 
never attained to that intimate perception of the 
likes and dislikes of his fellow-citizens, which is the 
most precious possession of a theatrical manager. 
He was so British in his feelings that when Bronson 
Howard brought him ' Drum-Taps,' afterward re- 
written as 'Shenandoah,' he asked if the American 
playwright could not transpose this intensely Amer- 
ican story of the Civil War and "make it the Crimea." 
In one of our conversations over my manuscript he 
bewailed that he did not understand his public. "I 
used to bring over all the latest London successes 
and to revive the old comedies and to have a new 
piece now and then by Dion or John" (Boucicault 
and Brougham) ; "and we got along very nicely; — 
but now I really don't know what they want." 

I trust I have made it plain that Wallack did not 



ADVENTURES IN PLAY-MAKING 329 

actually refuse my play and that I withdrew it from 
him before he could bring himself to a decision. I 
offered it to Daly and to A. M. Palmer, both of 
whom declined it, — without greatly discouraging 
me, since neither of them had then in his company 
a comedian specially qualified for the part I had 
cut to Wallack's measure. So in the summer of 1881 
I took the play over to London and submitted it to 
Charles Coghlan, an actor of keen intelligence and 
of unusual technical accomplishment. He liked the 
play, or at least, he liked the part; and he recom- 
mended it to his manager, Edgar Bruce. When I 
had to return to America in the fall Bruce was still 
undecided; and when I went back to England in the 
spring of 1883 I found that Bruce had mislaid my 
manuscript and that Coghlan had accepted an en- 
gagement in New York. 

Luckily I had another copy of the play with me 
in London and it was promptly accepted by John 
Clayton and Arthur Cecil of the Court Theater, 
where it was not produced until long after I had 
to return to the United States. On February 28, 
1884, it had its long-deferred first performance, more 
than six years after it had been composed. The 
cast was excellent, Mrs. John Wood, Mrs. Beerbohm 
Tree, Charles Cartwright, Arthur Cecil, and John 
Clayton, who seemed to me almost an ideal choice 
for the character composed originally for Wallack, 
but who was responsible in part for the ineffective- 
ness of the performance, since he represented my 
lazy man as a sleepy man, who diffused the desire 
to slumber among the spectators. 



330 THESE MANY YEARS 

Three years later A. M. Palmer began a series of 
Author's Matinees at the Madison Square Theater, 
bringing out in turn George Parsons Lathrop's 
'Elaine,' Howells's dramatization of his 'Foregone 
Conclusion,' and my 'Margery's Lovers,' each of 
them having a run limited to one consecutive 
matinee, altho all of them were frequently repeated 
when the company paid a summer visit to Chicago. 
In these performances by Palmer's company in 1887 
I was again unfortunate in the performer of the 
Wallack part, which was intrusted to E. M. Hol- 
land, an excellent actor in characters of a different 
type but not the authoritative light-comedian I had 
had in mind. 

On the other hand, I was most fortunate in my 
villain, impersonated by Alexander Salvini, son of 
the great Italian actor. When I had finished the 
revision of my play, I had to confess to myself that, 
whatever originality I might have been able to be- 
stow upon certain of the other characters, the villain 
was frankly a stage- villain quite devoid of veracity. 
My acquaintance with bad men has never been wide; 
and this bad man was not created by imagination 
working on observation; he was "made up out of 
my own head"; that is to say, he was a bald copy 
of the bold bad men who had intrigued and been 
discomfited in countless earlier plays. But Salvini 
took this black profile of malign intent and lent 
it a subtlety of color which deceived the audience 
into the belief that he was representing an accusable 
human being. In fact, one reviewer of the per- 
formance at the Madison Square singled out for 



ADVENTURES IN PLAY-MAKING 331 

cordial commendation my invention of a novel type 
of stage- villain — praise that belonged of right to 
the actor of the part and not to the author of the 
play. This brought home to me what I have else- 
where called the "paradox of dramatic criticism, "— 
that the first-night reviewer of a new piece has to 
form his impression from the performance; he can 
see the play only thru the rendering by the per- 
formers and he can see the acting only thru the me- 
dium of the play, so that he is in danger of misjudg- 
ing both the playwright and the players. 

As a mere matter of record I must mention that 
when 'Margery's Lovers' was produced in London, 
in 1884, a certain H. P. Stephens, librettist of 'Billee 
Taylor' and other operettas, charged that it had 
been stolen bodily from a play of his called ' Hearts ' 
which he had submitted only two years before to 
Palmer and to Daly. Of course, I asserted the orig- 
inality of my piece and I denied all knowledge of 
his, supporting my assertion with letters from 
Bunner and from Daly, declaring that they had 
read my manuscript years before the date when 
Stephens declared that he had written his. 

IV 

It was, I believe, in 1885 that Bunner introduced 
me to George H. Jessop, an Irishman of my own 
age, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, where 
he had been a favorite pupil of Dowden's. Jessop 
was a younger son of a good Irish family of Crom- 
wellian stock; and his ancestors were the owners 



332 THESE MANY YEARS 

of the estate in Ireland where Goldsmith had him- 
self made the blunder of taking a private house for 
an inn — a blunder which served him later as the 
basis of 'She Stoops to Conquer.' Jessop had taken 
his young brother's portion in 1873 and had trav- 
elled in Europe, crossed to the United States and 
wandered in time to San Francisco, where he awoke 
one morning to the total exhaustion of his funds. 
After disheartening experiences, some of which he 
utilized later at my suggestion, in the several short- 
stories contained in the volume called 'Gerald 
French's Friends,' he was able to establish himself 
as a journalist. At the request of an actor who 
asked him to write a play with "a good Jew" as 
its hero, he composed 'Sam'l of Posen' in less 
than a week and sold it for a small sum, only to see 
it performed all over the United States year after 
year to crowded houses. 

When I met him he had given up journalism for 
play-writing, having provided W. J. Florence, John 
T. Raymond and Marie Aimee with unpretending 
pieces that long retained the favor of the public. 
Thus when I became his friend his varied experience 
had given him a far more intimate acquaintance 
with stage-craft than I had had, altho my own in- 
terest in the theory of the theater was wider than 
his. 

He came to me one day with a proposal to write 
a play for John Raymond, who had previously 
produced a piece of his, * In Paradise,' and who had 
never produced my 'Touch and Go.' Jessop sug- 
gested that the play should be called ' A Gold Mine, ' 



ADVENTURES IN PLAY-MAKING 333 

and that it should present Raymond as absolutely 
out of money and yet trying to sell a gold mine. On 
that hint I spoke, suggesting that we should plan 
a piece a little more ambitious than a farce-melo- 
drama of the 'In Paradise' type and that we should 
so construct our story that the actor might have 
occasion to exercise his power of pathos. 

When E. A. Sothern took 'Our American Cousin' 
over to Paris in 1867 that he might astonish the 
French with his superbly caricatural Dundreary, 
Raymond had appeared as Asa Trenchard, playing 
with beautiful simplicity the pathetic scene in which 
he destroys the will which gives him the money that 
otherwise would go to the woman he loves, using the 
precious document to light his cigar while he is talk- 
ing to her. Knowing that he had the gift of pathos, 
Raymond had insisted on appearing in several 
serious plays, to the disgust of the spectators who had 
come to see him in the expectation of laughter and 
not of tears. What I proposed to Jessop was that 
we should collaborate in a comedy, which would 
provide laughter in its earlier episodes but which 
would also draw tears when the audience had been 
duly prepared to perceive the deeper side of the 
hero's nature. The play in which we carried out 
this plan pleased Raymond immensely and he pro- 
duced it in Memphis on Friday, April 1, 1887. He 
was then apparently in perfect health; yet most 
unexpectedly he died on April 10. 

There is no denying that this was a sad disappoint- 
ment to the two dramatists. They were soon cheered 
by an application for the play from Nat. C. Good- 



334 THESE MANY YEARS 

win, who was weary of the burlesques and the farces 
in which he had been appearing and who believed 
that he, too, could personate a comic character with 
pathetic moments. We had to wait two years be- 
fore Goodwin brought ' A Gold Mine ' to New York, 
where it was acted at the Fifth Avenue Theater 
on March 4, 1889. We had not seen Raymond's 
impersonation of the character we had composed 
for him; but we should have been hard to please if 
we had not been satisfied by the commingled humor 
and sentiment of Goodwin's performance, the first 
in which he displayed the range and the depth of 
his ability as an actor. Goodwin continued to 
appear in 'A Gold Mine' for several years; and after 
he gave it up, it was often performed by stock 
companies in different parts of the country. It is 
still popular with amateurs, for whose benefit it has 
been printed in the inexpensive yellow-backed series 
of 'French's Standard Drama.' 

Shortly after the play was acted in New York, 
a lady sued us for stealing our 'A Gold Mine' from 
her 'The Gold Mine.' Fortunately for us the 
single performance by Raymond in Memphis ante- 
dated the only performance of her piece; and it was 
easy for us to show also that there was absolutely 
no similarity between the two plays, ours being a 
quiet comedy with its scene laid in London, while 
hers was a noisy melodrama, the action of which 
took place in a mining-camp out West. 

After Goodwin had acquired the right to perform 
'A Gold Mine,' Jessop and I wrote a three-act farce 
for William H. Crane, which we called 'On Proba- 



ADVENTURES IN PLAY-MAKING 335 

tion.' When it was produced in 1889, it was some- 
what overshadowed by the superior success of the 
'Senator,' but it had its turn later; and Crane pre- 
sented it off and on for two or more years. We 
collaborated also in another three-act farce, contrived 
specifically for the Daly quartet — John Drew and 
Ada Rehan, James Lewis and Mrs. Gilbert. But 
Daly was not taken with it or at least not enough to 
be tempted to accept it. I told him that I regretted 
this, partly because I was very desirous of profiting 
by observing his methods of rehearsing a play. 
"Oh, but I shouldn't let you in !" he returned. He 
did not care to have his autocratic stage-directing 
interfered with even by the authors of the piece 
under rehearsal. What Daly rejected, Daniel Froh- 
man immediately accepted, supporting his good 
opinion of the piece by making us a payment in 
advance of the royalties we expected it to earn for 
us. Here again we were disappointed, for our play 
was frankly farcical, and the more often Frohman 
read it and the more familiar its entangled intrica- 
cies became to him the less funny he found it; and 
if a farce is not funny it is a thing of naught. Here 
I venture to think that he erred in not abiding by 
his first impression, because that would probably 
be the impression also of the spectators beholding 
the play for the first time — and very likely for the 
only time, since we rarely care to revisit a farce, the 
interest of which must reside mainly in the complexity 
of its comic complications. 



336 THESE MANY YEARS 



For a charity performance arranged by one of 
my friends I wrote a little one-act comedy, 'This 
Picture and That, ' which was represented by Henry 
Miller and Matilde Madison at the Lyceum Theater 
on April 15, 1887, and which is still occasionally 
acted. Mrs. Fiske used it as a curtain-raiser during 
one of her tours ; and it was the play in which Blanche 
Bates made her first appearance on the stage. I had 
been accused of plagiarism in 'Margery's Lovers' 
and in ' A Gold Mine, ' and I had found it very easy 
to show that the charge was baseless ; but if a similar 
accusation had been brought against 'This Picture 
and That,' my defense would have been more difficult, 
altho I was wholly unconscious of any utilization of 
another man's ideas. Shortly after my playlet 
was performed I went to see Bronson Howard's 
'Henrietta' and I remarked that the author gave 
credit to 'Vanity Fair' for suggesting to him a situa- 
tion in the third act. When the curtain fell after 
that act I was able to perceive, altho not very dis- 
tinctly, the situation Bronson Howard had bor- 
rowed; and to my dismay I recognized it as the 
same situation around which I had built 'This Pic- 
ture and That.' I had believed, and in fact I still 
believe, that I had invented this situation myself; 
but I cannot deny that Thackeray had used it first 
in a novel which I had read and reread. This ex- 
perience of my own makes me think it probable 
that Thackeray, when he described the death-bed of 



ADVENTURES IN PLAY-MAKING 337 

Colonel Newcome, had forgotten the last words and 
dying speech of Leatherstocking. 

I wrote another one-act comedy, a few years later, 
for the Theater of Arts and Letters, an enterprise 
which Henry B. McDowell carried on during the 
winter of 1892-3 and which was intended to annul 
the divorce between literature and the drama by 
coaxing men of letters into turning their novels into 
plays. Of course, this is a false principle; the drama 
is lifted up into literature only when the men of the 
theater develop into men of letters without ceasing 
to be practical playwrights. No art was ever bene- 
fited by alluring into it the practitioners of another 
art. If any art is ever to be raised to a loftier 
level this can be done only by arousing the ambi- 
tion of its own practitioners. 

The so-called Theater of Arts and Letters gave its 
performances at irregular intervals in different play- 
houses; I followed them all with interest and with 
instruction. The presentation of Mary E. Wilkins' 
New England tragedy 'Giles Corey' and of Stock- 
ton's 'Squirrel Inn' revealed that these two adroit 
and sincere story-tellers were not equipped either 
with the technic or with the instinct of the born 
play-maker. Of all the pieces produced by Mc- 
Dowell only three really held the attention of the 
friendly audiences which came together month after 
month in the vain hope of a new revelation. These 
were all one-act plays, and they were all from the 
pens of men more or less professionally familiar with 
stage-craft. One was the 'Other Woman' by Rich- 
ard Harding Davis. Another was 'Harvest' by 



338 THESE MANY YEARS 

Clyde Fitch, afterward utilized by him as the cen- 
tral act of the 'Moth and the Flame.' And the 
third was my own 'Decision of the Court,' produced 
on March 23, 1893, in a little theater up-stairs on 
the corner of Broadway and Twenty -ninth Street. 
As the heroine, who until the court has decided, 
does not know whether she is married or unmar- 
ried, Agnes Booth was as brilliant as she had been 
in the 'Silent System.' It was a delight to observe 
her certainty of execution and to hear her trained 
voice with its perfect clarity and its exquisite mod- 
ulation. 



VI 

In the fall of 1898 I was asked if I could not find 
a historic character around which to write a play for 
William H. Crane. Not long before I had seen the 
actor's vigorous portrayal of Sir Anthony Absolute, 
and this prompted me to believe that he would be 
a picturesque impersonator of Peter Stuyvesant as 
Irving had drawn the old governor in the veracious 
'History of Diedrich Knickerbocker.' This sugges- 
tion was tempting to the comedian, who perceived 
specially the humorous possibilities of the old 
governor's wooden leg. I began by reading up, and 
I decided to invent a conspiracy of the British to 
seize New Amsterdam by surprise two years before 
the actual capture of the city, a conspiracy to be 
foiled by the firmness of Stuyvesant. I had so far 
developed my plot as to see how I could introduce 
three different love-stories, when word was brought 



ADVENTURES IN PLAY-MAKING 339 

me that Bronson Howard might be willing to col- 
laborate with me. He was an old friend of mine for 
whom I already had the highest regard both as a 
man and as a dramatist; so I went to see him as 
soon as I could. 

He agreed to join me in writing the play on two 
conditions. The first was that the resulting piece 
should be announced as by Brander Matthews and 
Bronson Howard and not as by Bronson Howard and 
Brander Matthews. Against this I protested, since 
he was the older and the better soldier and his name 
ought, therefore, to precede mine. He was inex- 
orable; and as the play was not to be his exclusive 
work, he insisted on signing his name after mine. 
After a vain debate I yielded, altho I was still un- 
convinced of the soundness of his position. Then he 
stated his second condition — that the material I 
had already gathered should seem to him promising. 
I outlined the conspiracy, the three love-stories, the 
group of subordinate characters devised to supply 
a background of the conditions of life in New Am- 
sterdam two centuries ago; and to my great grati- 
fication he expressed his complete satisfaction. 

We made a formal contract with each other and 
another with Crane ; then we set to work immediately 
to invent the intricate details of the conspiracy and 
to construct the plot of the play with Stuyvesant as 
its dominating figure. Howard had already written 
one play for Crane, the 'Henrietta,' and I had 
written another, 'On Probation,' so we knew by 
personal experience the wide range of the comedian's 
professional ability. We were both of us aware that 



340 THESE MANY YEARS 

he had authority, one of the indispensable elements 
of an actor's equipment. We had both discovered 
that altho his popularity rested on his capacity as a 
comedian, he had dignity, intensity, and pathos, 
all qualifications we determined to utilize. We 
began work together the first week in January 
and our play was delivered to the actor early in the 
summer. An excellent company was engaged for 
it; and after a week in Providence it was produced 
at the Star Theater in New York on October 2, 
1899. It did not achieve the success for which we 
had hoped. 

It is always idle to try to explain away a failure, 
but after the lapse of nearly a score of years I think 
I can spy out the reasons why our comedy-drama was 
a disappointment. The complexity of the conspir- 
acy was a little too cumbrous, and already a little 
old-fashioned in its theatrical machinery. Then 
we had treated the culmination of the third act 
tragically instead of pathetically, because we knew 
that Crane was a master of tragic intensity. But 
this was a blunder, since we did not count on the 
predilections and prejudices of the spectators, who 
were disconcerted by the grim power unexpectedly 
visible in a comedian. An audience is always glad 
when a comic actor reveals himself possessed of 
pathos; but they are taken aback when they are 
invited to applaud him as a tragedian, however 
brief and infrequent these tragic moments may be. 

The fault was not the actor's, for he rose to the 
height of the situation we had given him. No 
authors could have asked for a more masterly de- 



ADVENTURES IN PLAY-MAKING 341 

lineation of the character they had conceived. The 
failure was ours, not his. We had also made another 
miscalculation. We knew what the actor was capa- 
ble of doing, so we had not called upon him to reveal 
qualities he had never before displayed. But we 
had done this because we were old playgoers long 
familiar with his equipment, but we failed to con- 
sider that the younger generation knew him chiefly 
as a funmaker in farces, like 'On Probation/ and 
could not recall the stern veracity he had exhib- 
ited in the 'Henrietta.' The audience which gath- 
ered to see 'Peter Stuyvesant' came in expectation 
of laughter and of laughter only; and before word 
could get to the other possible spectators who would 
have relished our more varied reproduction of the 
days of the Dutch, the career of the play had been 
brought to an end. 

To me the memory of my collaboration with Bron- 
son Howard is most grateful. He was the most con- 
siderate of partners ; — indeed, Augustus Thomas 
quaintly explained the non-success of our play by 
saying that "the collaborators had probably been too 
polite to each other" ! Polite Bronson Howard 
could not fail to be, but he was firm always in insist- 
ing on that which he believed to be best. The 
dramatists, like all other craftsmen, work by native 
instinct mainly ; and they do their work by reason of 
an intuitive endowment for their special art. Only 
a few of them are intelligent enough and thoughtful 
enough to be able to deduce the principles which 
have guided their practice. Bronson Howard was 
one of the few who knew why he did what he did and 



342 THESE MANY YEARS 

who could always give a good reason for what he had 
done. It is impossible for me to overestimate the 
profit I derived from being taken into his workshop ; 
and when I came later to analyze the processes of 
Moliere and of Shakspere as playwrights pure and 
simple, I found myself constantly aided by what I 
had picked up from the practice and the precepts 
of Bronson Howard. 



VII 

As I look back over my experiences as a play- 
wright, I do not see that I have any reason to be dis- 
satisfied. Of the. six plays of mine which have been 
produced in New York, I was disappointed only by 
'Peter Stuyvesant' and 'Margery's Lovers.' The 
two one-act pieces had almost as large a measure of 
success as is possible to that unpopular form, which 
no longer has a place in the economy of the modern 
stage. 'A Gold Mine' and 'On Probation' attained 
a wider and a more enduring popularity than I had 
hoped for; — quite possibly they succeeded beyond 
their deserts. 

If I have not established myself as a dramatist, 
consolidating a reputation as a playwright by a 
constant succession of plays one following the other, 
year after year, there are two explanations to be 
advanced, either of them adequate alone and the 
two together being unanswerable. The first is that 
whatever the value of my theatrical wares, I was 
never a pushing or a plausible sales-agent for them. 
They had to sell solely on their own merits, and I 



ADVENTURES IN PLAY-MAKING 343 

was devoid of the necessary persistency of the com- 
mercial traveller who knows just where and just how 
to place his goods. I could not incessantly vaunt 
what I had to sell to those who were in the mar- 
ket for plays — actors, actor-managers, and man- 
agers. There is an indisputable truth in a remark 
I once heard from the lips of a successful play- 
wright: "Any fool can write a play — but it takes 
a clever man to get the play acted." 

The second is that even if I myself held play- 
making to be my vocation, those whom I approached 
always supposed that it was only an avocation. 
For this supposition there was not a little war- 
rant, since I was known to be writing short-stories 
and novels, essays and criticisms. I was regarded 
as a man of letters rather than as a man of the 
theater. Nor can I deny that I failed to give to 
the drama the single-hearted devotion that it de- 
mands. The art of the playwright brooks no rival 
and it is tolerant of only one competitor, the art of 
the actor. And especially is it hostile to the art to 
which I came in time to take an almost equal in- 
terest, the art of criticism. Many an actor and many 
a novelist has been also a playwright. But Less- 
ing is the only dramatic critic who has ever proved 
his power himself to practise what he preached to 
others. Perhaps I ought to qualify this statement 
by saying that Lessing was the only professed 
dramatic critic who succeeded also as a dramatist, 
until a century later when Jules Lemaitre repeated 
the feat. It is not strictly true, of course, that 
"the critics are those who have failed in literature 



344 THESE MANY YEARS 

and in art"; yet it is true that the critic who has 
himself attempted the art is likely to be more com- 
petent, to have a keener insight into its principles 
and its practices, its traditions and its technic, than 
the critic who has never adventured himself into the 
studio and the stage. 



CHAPTER XV 
AMONG THE PLAYERS 



DURING one of my talks with Eugene Nus 
in Paris, in 1873, he said to me that if I 
wanted to write for the stage I ought to 
go to the theater frequently — si vous voulez faire 
du theatre, it faut y alter souvent. I recognized the 
advice as excellent; but I knew also that I did not 
need it, since I had been a most assiduous playgoer 
from my youth up, as I have abundantly testified 
in these chapters. My parents liked the theater 
themselves, and even when I was only a young boy 
they took me with them to see Edwin Booth as Rich- 
elieu and as Hamlet during his successive engage- 
ments at the Winter Garden in 1864 and 1865. 
When I returned from Paris at the age of fifteen I 
was soon allowed to go to the theater by myself. 
I still accompanied my parents when they went, 
but as they were less eager for the drama than I was 
I saw many performances that did not attract 
them. While I was in college and at the law school 
I became "a regular first-nighter," as the phrase is; 
and there were then so few theaters in New York 
that attendance at all first performances was possible 
and not arduous. Even if this self-imposed duty 

345 



346 THESE MANY YEARS 

had been strenuous I should have done my best to 
accomplish it, as my appetite for the stage was 
insatiable — so insatiable that more than once I 
have attended five or six performances in a single 
week. 

I think it safe to say that I have seen almost 
everything that was worth seeing in the theaters 
of New York in the half-century which elapsed 
between 1865 and 1915, altho I ceased to be a 
regular first-nighter long before the end of this period, 
limiting my visits to the theater to those performances 
which I had reason to believe would repay me. In 
the course of these years there are favorite plays 
that I have seen a score of times — indeed, I think 
that I must have witnessed ' As You Like It ' and the 
'School for Scandal' nearer forty times than twenty. 
I can call a long roll of Rosalinds wandering blithely 
thru the woods of Arden — Mrs. Scott-Siddons, 
Fanny Davenport, Helena Modjeska, Ada Caven- 
dish, Lillie Langtry, Rose Coghlan, Mary Anderson, 
Ada Rehan, Julia Marlowe, Margaret Anglin, Edith 
Wynne Matthison; and it would be hard to make 
a final choice out of this bevy of beauties. I recol- 
lect Mrs. Scott-Siddons as thin and fragile, and Ada 
Cavendish as bouncing and meretricious. Fanny 
Davenport filled the eye with her glowing loveliness 
of face and figure, and she gave to Rosalind her 
own high spirits; but captivating as was her deline- 
ation of the most delightful of Shakspere's women, 
it lacked poetry; and poetry, ineffable grace and 
youth and springtime joy it was that Mary Ander- 
son suggested. A similar womanliness, evasive and 



AMONG THE PLAYERS 347 

tantalizing, characterized Ada Rehan in this part. 
In technical skill, in clearness of conception, and in 
certainty of execution Modjeska's Rosalind was in- 
comparable, yet it was foreign, it had not the at- 
mosphere of England; and I knew exactly what 
Bunner meant when he declared that Modjeska's 
performance would be " simply perfect — if one 
could first admit that Rosalind was really a pretty 
French widow" ! 

Before leaving this romantic comedy, so real even 
tho it is laid in a realm of fantasy and so lyric even 
tho it has less verse and more prose in proportion 
than is customary in Shakspere's lighter pieces, I 
must chronicle the performance of "As You Like It' 
in 1893 by the Professional Woman's League, in 
which every part was taken by a woman, a strange 
transformation for a play every part in which had 
been taken by a man when it had been originally 
acted nearly three centuries earlier by the company 
wherein Shakspere himself was an actor-manager. 
This manifestation of feminism in the drama was 
made significant to me by the sturdy impersona- 
tion of Orlando by Mary Shaw and by the elocu- 
tionary effort of the aging Janauschek as Jaques. 

The 'School for Scandal' I must have seen as 
often as 'As You Like It,' and the 'Rivals' almost as 
frequently. Yet I have never seen either of Sheri- 
dan's comedies with a cast that completely satisfied 
me. Despite the liberties he took with the text, the 
excision of the supersentimental Julia and Falkland, 
the amplification of Bob Acres, all to my mind 
perfectly justifiable, the 'Rivals' as Jefferson chose 



348 THESE MANY YEARS 

to have it performed was a rich and satisfying 
presentation. His own Bob Acres was a humorous 
masterpiece, even if there was justice in William 
Warren's gibe that Jefferson presented the 'Rivals' 
with "Sheridan twenty miles away." Mrs. John 
Drew 's Mrs. Malaprop was perfection itself, infinitely 
superior to that presented in London almost simul- 
taneously by Mrs. Sterling. Mrs. Drew gave point 
to every one of her incessant dislocations of the 
vocabulary by the evident pride she took in that 
particular derangement of epitaphs. Mrs. Sterling 
emphasized every verbal blunder as tho she were 
fully conscious of its enormity; she seemed to be 
saying, as she stood throwing her contorted phrases 
straight in the faces of the spectators: "There, I'm 
Mrs. Malaprop, and this is a malapropism, and I 
do hope you will see it and roar at it !" 

John Gilbert was the finest and the firmest of Sir 
Anthonys, as he was the final expression of Sir 
Peter; and William H. Crane was as vigorous and 
as humorous as any Sir Anthony I ever beheld, 
excepting only John Gilbert. But as Sir Lucius 
O'Trigger neither William J. Florence or Nat. C. 
Goodwin, actors of far more mimetic power and of 
a far wider versatility, ever equalled John Brougham, 
who found in Sheridan's Irish gentleman the one 
character in all his long stage career in which he had 
simply to suggest himself — or at least in which he 
had seemingly not to assume a part but merely to 
be what he was. This is not the only instance, even 
if it is the most salient, in my playgoing experience, 
when I have found an actor of no special ability 



AMONG THE PLAYERS 349 

extraordinarily effective in some one part which he 
appeared to be born to play. 

I must have seen almost as many Lady Teazles as 
I have Rosalinds; and yet far fewer linger in my 
memory as having succeeded brilliantly in that most 
brilliant part, which, sparkling as it is, does not carry 
the actress so completely as the simpler, more femi- 
nine, and more human Rosalind. When I run down 
the list of my Lady Teazles — Mrs. D. P. Bowers 
and Madeline Henriques, Mrs. Hoey and Mrs. Lang- 
try, Rose Eytinge and Rose Coghlan, Fanny Daven- 
port and Ada Rehan, Sara Jewett and Annie Russell, 
Lady Bancroft and Winifred Emory — I am again 
inclined to pick out Fanny Davenport as the one, on 
the whole, most satisfying; perhaps this is because 
I was very young when I first beheld her in the 
radiancy of her youthful charm, and perhaps because 
her youth and her beauty, her high spirits and her 
enjoyment of life made me credit her performance 
with more merit than it had. 

Of the many impersonators of the more smooth 
and suave Joseph Surface I doubt if any one has left 
a more decided impression on my memory than Louis 
James. Of the many actors whom I have seen as 
his careless and reckless brother Charles, I do not 
know whether Charles Wyndham or Charles Coghlan 
gave the more incisive performance. And of course 
I have never seen, nor has any one else in the past 
half -century, any rendering of Sir Peter comparable 
with John Gilbert's. This was totally satisfying; 
there was no possibility in the part that Gilbert did 
not perceive and seize and bring out; and I doubt 



350 THESE MANY YEARS 

if his personation of the character was ever surpassed 
even by its creator at the original production at 
Drury Lane nearly a century and a half ago. 

John Gilbert still played the screen scene in accord 
with the tradition which had been handed down from 
Sheridan's time, a tradition now abandoned because 
of the amelioration of manners and the development 
of sympathy. Sheridan was following in the foot- 
steps of the Restoration dramatists, as heartless as 
they were witty, so there is no warmth of senti- 
ment in the ' School for Scandal ' — there is no true 
love-scene, not even between Charles and Maria, 
the only pair of young people who are married off at 
the end of the piece. The tone of the comedy is 
hard and chilly; it glitters like an icicle; and when 
the screen falls, disclosing Lady Teazle to Sir Peter, 
she is greatly put out because she has been caught, 
and he is hurt in his pride rather than in his heart. 
That this was the case Gilbert indicated simply and 
directly, somehow managing to convey the impres- 
sion that his face flushed and then paled. 

That this was wholly in accord with the intent of 
Sheridan, we may be sure; he was writing a satiric 
comedy, not a play of sentiment. But nowadays 
we demand sentiment even in satire; and therefore 
when the screen falls, Lady Teazle is now discovered 
dissolved in tears, and when at last she speaks, 
sobs choke her utterance. This new attitude of the 
actress compels her husband to a new departure; 
so Sir Peter in his turn is now pathetic, overlooking 
the hurt to his pride in his consciousness of the pain 
in his heart. And this again forces another change 



AMONG THE PLAYERS 351 

upon the performer of Charles, whom Sheridan calls 
upon to laugh at Joseph and Sir Peter and Lady 
Teazle, to flout them and to jeer at them one after 
another. To us nowadays, subdued to more senti- 
mentalized moods, this conduct of Charles would be 
callous; it would be contrary to our idea as to the 
proper conduct of a gentleman; it would rob the 
actor of the sympathy of the audience. So it is 
that Charles, while he may still jeer at Joseph and 
even at Sir Peter, lets his flouting fade from his 
lips when he looks back at the repentant figure of 
Lady Teazle, like Niobe all tears. 



II 

Nearly forty years ago, in one of the earliest num- 
bers of the ' Era Almanack,' Shirley Brooks, then the 
editor of Punch, condensed his recollections of the 
interesting performances he had witnessed into a list 
of the finest moments he associated with the names 
of every great actor. This list has always seemed to 
me to have more significance than Shirley Brooks 
suspected, since the moment which rises unbidden 
in the memory of a trained observer at the name of 
a tragedian or a comedian is likely to be that when 
the performer spoke the phrase or made the gesture 
or assumed the attitude which was emblematic and 
symptomatic of his special talent. It would help 
us to see in what kind of part he had been most 
characteristically effective; and I am therefore 
moved to make out a similar list of the specific 



352 THESE MANY YEARS 

effects which have most deeply etched themselves 
on my memory. I have already recorded the intense 
impression made on me by Charlotte Cushman's 
"Be husband to me, heaven!" as Queen Katharine 
in * Henry VIII,' and by Fechter's headsman-like 
attitude in the final act of 'Ruy Bias. ' 

From Coquelin's immense gallery it is very difficult 
indeed to make a choice, since so many moments, 
so different one from the other, come thronging for- 
ward; but I think I am justified in selecting the 
expression which slowly came into his face in the 
'Etrangere' of the younger Dumas, when he awak- 
ened at last to the fact that the American was bent 
on insulting him. And by the side of this I should 
put the superb conceit of Cyrano as he improvises 
the ballade on the duel that he is actually engaged 
in fighting. On the other hand, the choice from 
Joseph Jefferson is easy, since it appears obvious 
that I must cite the revived Rip Van Winkle's "Are 
we then so soon forgot?" From Ristori I should 
take the stiletto look with which as Lucrezia Borgia 
she emphasized the name of the husband who is 
jealous and suspicious and threatening: "Don 
Alfonso d'Este, my third husband!" From Duse 
I cannot but set down here the expression of un- 
utterable woe which descended upon her face in 
'Cavalleria Rusticana' when the husband thanked 
her for telling him that her lover has an intrigue 
with his wife. From the third of the Italian masters 
of the histrionic art, Salvini, I recall most vividly 
the impulsive casting down of Iago with the foot 
raised as if to stamp him to death. It is a gesture 



AMONG THE PLAYERS 353 

once more that rises before me now when I seek 
to evoke the most characteristic specimen of Sarah- 
Bernhardt's novel and inventive technic — the suc- 
cessive jerks of feverish impatience with which Frou- 
frou tears the fringe from the sofa-cushion in the 
big scene with her sister, whose unthinking unself- 
ishness is bringing disaster to both of them. 

My earliest recollection of Booth is the instant 
where Richelieu draws the awful circle of the church 
around the ward he is protecting; and my latest 
is the malignant dance of Bertuccio when the Fool 
believes that he has attained his Revenge. Irving 
I saw first in Alberry's once blooming but now long 
faded 'Two, Roses' ; I can still hear the crisp 
utterance which accompanied his presentation of 
" A little check!" From his later impersonations I 
find most vivid the salient profile of the red figure of 
Mephistopheles in the mad revels of 'Faust.' Nor 
is there danger of erring if I pick out for Ellen Terry 
the sparkling gaiety of her Beatrice, when she de- 
clares that "a star danced, and under that I was 
born." So it is not difficult for me to declare that 
what I recall with most certainty out of all Mary 
Anderson's poetic impersonations of poetic heroines 
is the grace and abandon of Perdita's entrancing 
dance with Florizel in the springtime of their young 
love. Clara Morris, a most unequal actress of rich 
native gift hampered by lack of taste and by defects 
of early training, gave me a thrill of horror when 
I began to perceive in the heroine of 'Article 47' 
the symptoms of incipient insanity which she man- 
aged somehow to convey to us all at that first per- 



354 THESE MANY YEARS 

formance by a slow working of her body to and 
fro while her eyes were set in a deadly stare. 

From the repertory of Ludwig Barnay, the most 
gifted and accomplished German actor it has ever 
been my good fortune to know, I could not but 
single out the piercing look of inquiry with which 
Mark Antony sizes up the crowd in the Forum around 
Caesar's body, to see whether it is time for him to 
play his trump-card and to produce Caesar's will. 
From the repertory of Mrs. Fiske I should take the 
nervous chill of Tess of the D'Urbervilles after she 
returns with the bloody knife in her hand. From 
Agnes Booth I should have to give the whole of that 
long soliloquy in the 'Engaged' of W. S. Gilbert, a 
soliloquy the delivery of which was punctuated by 
intermittent biting into the tart she was slowly de- 
vouring, a soliloquy so long that Mrs. Booth broke it 
into three and hid its extreme length from the audi- 
ence, who listened to it with the keenest enjoyment. 
And I may end by adding that to me at least nothing 
that Nat. Goodwin ever did was truer in its simplic- 
ity, more unaffectedly pathetic, than his final words 
as the curtain fell on the second act of 'A Gold 
Mine': "Well, it was worth it !" 

When I seek to set by the side of these single 
effects of individual performers a corresponding list 
of performances in which every part was so appro- 
priately played that the total impression was abso- 
lutely satisfying, I must begin by leaving out a dozen 
or a score of the representations of the Comedie- 
Frangaise which I accept as impeccable beyond cavil. 
'Ruy Bias' with Mounet-Sully and Coquelin and 



AMONG THE PLAYERS 355 

Sarah-Bernhardt, before her golden voice had been 
worn and before her manner had degenerated into 
mannerism — this is one of them; and another is 
the ' Etrangere ' with the splendor of its original cast, 
exceptionally splendid even for the Frangais. Far 
less glittering in its individual impersonations and 
yet most admirable as a whole was 'Julius Caesar' 
by the Meiningen company as I beheld it at Drury 
Lane in June, 1881, with Mark Antony impersonated 
by Barnay, about whose perfect adaptation to the 
part there could be no dispute. 

Of performances seen in America I am inclined to 
single out three. The first in point of time is the 
production of 'Henry V by Charles Calvert at 
Booth's Theater, with George Rignold as the young 
King and with all the host of character parts which 
give variety to Shakspere's loose- jointed and undra- 
matic history vigorously individualized. The sec- 
ond, again in chronological order, is the 'Taming of 
the Shrew' when Hamilton Bell designed the cos- 
tumes and when Daly's company was rich in comic 
actors of both sexes, headed by the superb quartet 
whose team-play was unerring — Ada Rehan, John 
Drew, James Lewis, and Mrs. Gilbert. For the third 
and last I must choose the 'Thunderbolt' as that 
piece was acted by the company of the New Theater 
to be dissolved forever only a few months later. I 
doubt if our modern stage has seen any modern play 
more artistically performed than was Pinero's mas- 
terpiece under the direction of Winthrop Ames, or 
more harmoniously represented in all its quieter details 
as well as in all its intensely dramatic moments. 



356 THESE MANY YEARS 



III 

A performance like that of the 'Thunderbolt' 
at the New Theater in 1911, reflects high credit upon 
the manager, who after all is the man ultimately re- 
sponsible for it, since he has chosen the several 
members of the company and has selected also 
the stage-manager, the art-director, and all the 
other junior officers whose combined efficiency makes 
possible a performance as perfect as this. Few of 
the historians of dramatic literature in the past 
and few of the theatrical critics of the present have 
perceived the immense importance of the manager, 
or have noted how few managers there have been in 
the theaters of Great Britain and the United States 
who have impressed their individualities upon the 
drama. The manager of recognized ability is far 
rarer than the actor or the dramatist of equal equip- 
ment; and actors and dramatists of high repute 
have failed dismally when they undertook theatrical 
management. David Garrick, successful as an actor 
and successful as a dramatist, was triumphantly 
successful also as manager, whereas Sheridan, who 
succeeded him in the control of Drury Lane, was 
lamentably unsuccessful. Edwin Booth built a the- 
ater for himself in New York and, from lack of busi- 
ness capacity, he allowed it to slip from his lax con- 
trol. 

On the other hand, Augustin Daly had a manage- 
rial career of more than thirty years, full of vicissi- 
tudes, no doubt, broken in the middle by failure, and 



AMONG THE PLAYERS 357 

yet filled with valiant effort, strongly individual, and 
incessantly interesting. I was a friendly spectator 
of the whole of Daly's managerial struggles, in at 
least four different playhouses in New York; I even 
chanced to witness certain of his ambitious forays 
into foreign countries. For instance, I was present 
at the Vaudeville Theater in August, 1891, when he 
permitted the Parisians to gaze in amused amaze- 
ment at 'As You Like It,' probably the first time that 
Shakspere's comedy had ever been acted in English 
in the French capital. And I had previously been 
one of the friendly Americans in London in July, 
1884, when he first introduced his company to the 
British public, an occasion on which I was enabled 
to calculate the time-reaction of Londoners toward 
an American joke. The piece was, so I seem to re- 
call, 'Seven Twenty -Eight,' or one of Daly's other 
free Americanizations of German farces, and as it 
was familiar to most of us American visitors to Lon- 
don, our laughs followed swift upon the utterance of 
every merry jest on the stage; then there would be 
a brief interval of silence; and finally the main 
body of the British audience apprehended the exotic 
joke and laughed in platoons. 

Daly had his own views about everything, and he 
insisted on carrying them out. He did not hesitate 
to rearrange Sheridan and Shakspere to accord with 
his own whim. His taste was often at fault and his 
judgment was sometimes at sea; but no man ever 
lived who was more intensely absorbed by his special 
art. He lived in the theater and for the theater; 
and as a direct consequence of this, what he did in 



358 THESE MANY YEARS 

the theater was unfailingly interesting, even when 
it was most wrong-headed. He had inexhaustible 
energy and boundless ambition. He hoped to make 
his theater an American equivalent of the Comedie- 
Frangaise, with a permanent company and a reper- 
tory of standard comedies in stock and always on 
hand. For several winters he had subscription 
Tuesdays, at which the same audiences gathered 
week after week. He always sent me invitations 
for these performances; and he often also sent me 
a complimentary pass for the season, admitting me 
whenever I might care to drop in. 

He liked to celebrate himself or at least to cele- 
brate the company of comedians whom he kept to- 
gether year after year; and in 1887 he asked me to 
aid him in editing 'A Portfolio of Players/ to contain 
a score of photogravure portraits in character of his 
leading performers, for which Hutton and Bunner, 
William Winter and I prepared vignettes of apprecia- 
tion and for which Bunner rimed a witty epistle to 
'A Playgoer of the Twentieth Century,' a copy of 
verses appropriately serving as an epilog. In the 
course of our meetings to arrange this volume he 
said to Hutton suddenly: "How is it that I haven't 
seen you at the theater lately?" Hutton explained 
that he had married and that he found it therefore 
more expensive to go to the play. "But didn't I 
send you a season ticket?" Daly inquired. "Yes," 
Hutton responded, "but I'd pay for four seats any 
time rather than face your father-in-law with a pass 
in my hand." 

Daly laughed, for he knew John Duff's detestation 



AMONG THE PLAYERS 359 

of all deadheads, which was perhaps the reason 
why he had stationed his father-in-law by the side 
of the ticket-taker. The story is told that a lively 
little man once asked for a pass and was referred to 
Duff, whose huge bulk towered on the top of the 
steps behind the railing. "Mr. Duff, do you pass 
the profession ? " was the lively little man's question. 
To this Duff responded with another query: "And 
what might be your connection with the profession ? " 
Whereupon the lively little man proclaimed himself 
to be "the lightning ticket-seller down to Barnum's 
circus ! " Duff looked down on him and then 
pointed to the box-office, saying: "Then let me see 
how quick you can buy one ! " 

Here occasion serves for a personal explanation. 
At least I claim the right to interrupt my own narra- 
tive by rising to a question of privilege. There is 
now in circulation an anecdote which has somehow 
attached itself to my name to the effect that I once 
attended the first performance of a play on the in- 
vitation of its author. Perhaps I had better cite 
the rest of the story from the Liverpool newspaper 
where I last saw it. "At the end of the first act 
there was a chilly silence among the audience, but 
Mr. Matthews applauded, as in duty bound. At 
the end of the second act the audience hissed, while 
Mr. Matthews kept a troubled silence. At the end 
of the third act Mr. Matthews went out and paid 
for his seat, and came back and hissed with the 
rest." Now this is a good story and I regret that 
I have no right to appear as the ingenious hero. I 
cordially agree with the late Adrian Joline, the 



360 THESE MANY YEARS 

autograph collector, that "jokes ought to be regis- 
tered, so as not to be transferable to bearer." 

I was a witness also of the managerial career of 
A. M. Palmer, who resigned the librarianship of the 
Mercantile Library to take charge of the Union 
Square Theater, going on later to the Madison Square 
and finally to Wallack's. And I observed with an 
even acuter interest the rise of Harrigan and Hart, 
who came forward first with a song-and-dance at 
the Theatre Comique, and who slowly and steadily 
broadened the scope of their little act, until the 
i Mulligan Guards' Parade' was in due season suc- 
ceeded by 'Squatter Sovereignty,' which survives 
in my memory as Harrigan's best play, the one in 
which he most satisfactorily revealed the possibili- 
ties of the special kind of piece he had devised in 
the course of years of experiment. He recruited 
his company from the variety-shows, from the per- 
formers who were accustomed to present fixed 
types, the stock Irishman, the stock German, the 
stock Chinaman, the stock negro. Then he called 
upon these actors of limited range to bring out 
more sharply the differences in character which 
exist within the stock-type. Harrigan not only had 
a keen eye for character, as he had studied it in the 
tenement-house neighborhoods, he was also a most 
skilful stage-manager. No one who ever saw the sep- 
arate entrances of the clan Murphy and of the clan 
Macintyre in 'Squatter Sovereignty' can forget the 
delicate discrimination of these two groups of Amer- 
icanized Hibernians. 

Here was acting of a delightful kind within its 
rigid limitations; no wonder it won high commenda- 



AMONG THE PLAYERS 361 

tion from Ho wells, among other critics. This hugely 
disgusted John Gilbert, who once expressed to me 
the surprise of a highly trained actor that these 
variety-show impersonations of fixed types should 
be so warmly praised for their restricted art. 
Coquelin was more open-minded; and when I asked 
him in 1888, on his first visit to America, to see 
Harrigan in 'Waddy Googan,' he appreciated the 
special quality of the play and of the performance, 
saying that it had a flavor of its own: "C'est quel- 
que chose de tres-'particulier" 

At Harrigan' s request I took Coquelin behind the 
scenes and introduced him, discovering to my sur- 
prise that Harrigan could speak French. In fact; 
his understanding of the foreign tongue was more 
thoro than Lester Wallack's, if I may judge by a 
slip of the latter in a talk he had with me after I 
had published an article on the Comedie-Frangaise 
in which there were portraits of the two Coquelins, 
labelled respectively "Coquelin Aine" and "Coquelin 
Cadet." Wallack remarked to me that he had 
been talking with Boucicault about this article, add- 
ing that "Dion says that the younger Coquelin 
alne is the better actor." The blunder in French 
was Wallack's own, even if the blunder in criticism 
was Boucicault's. And perhaps this is as good a 
moment as any that I am likely to find in these 
pages, to set down another blunder of another 
manager who was hesitating over a play of mine. 
"I like the people in your piece and the talk is ex- 
cellent," he said, "but I don't much care for the 
plot. Can't you use those characters and that dia- 
log in another story ? " 



362 THESE MANY YEARS 



IV 

In the last thirty years of the nineteenth cen- 
tury the most prominent actor-manager in Great 
Britain was Henry Irving; and in my successive 
visits to London and in his successive visits to New 
York I was enabled to see him repeatedly in all 
his more prominent parts. He had a compelling 
personality as an actor and nothing that he did was 
negligible. He had the grand style, in spite of 
the mannerisms of his walk and of his utterance. 
He used his taste, his skill, his inventiveness as a 
stage-manager to set off his achievement as an actor 
and to supplement and even on occasion to dis- 
guise his histrionic limitations. 

He was large-minded and liberal, as he proved 
when he invited Booth to join him at the Lyceum 
and to alternate with him as Othello and Iago. This 
was truly generous, since Irving was prosperous at 
the time, and Booth's London engagement had not 
been successful. It was perhaps even more gener- 
ous than Irving himself suspected, because Booth 
was a tragedian who could rise to Othello, altho he 
was perhaps even more effective in the character 
part of Iago, whereas Irving was essentially a per- 
former of character parts and lacked the massive- 
ness and the sweep which tragedy demands. 

To my great regret I did not arrive in London 
that summer until after the twin stars had ceased 
to shine simultaneously. But from a friend in the 
Lyceum company I heard how Irving had deferred 



AMONG THE PLAYERS 363 

in every way to Booth, only to discover that the 
American was only too glad to let his British friend 
carry all the burden of stage-management. Irving 
himself set so much store by meticulous exactness 
in detail that he was perturbed to find that Booth 
felt himself to be wholly independent of its assistance. 
He could not quite understand Booth's attitude in 
relying entirely upon his sheer power as an actor. A 
keen and competent critic of acting, Gordon Wigan, 
gave me an unbiased opinion of the two memorable 
performances, declaring that nothing could be more 
delightful than Booth as Othello and Irving as Iago, 
whereas the next evening when the characters were 
exchanged the result was most unsatisfactory, since 
Booth as Iago simply extinguished Irving as Othello, 
a part for which the British actor had not the physical 
qualifications. 

When Irving paid his first visit to America we 
made him a Kinsman, and with his usual liberality 
he immediately presented to every other Kinsman 
a "bone" for the Lyceum in London — an engraved 
ivory token admitting any one of us at any time to 
his theater. At one Kinsmen supper in April, 1884, 
I had the good luck to be seated between Booth and 
Irving; it was grateful to observe the cordiality of 
their friendship, in spite of the fact that they were 
necessarily professional rivals. When they fell to 
discussing the great actors of the past, I sat silent, 
listening to each in turn; and I watched to see 
whether either of them had really read up the his- 
tory of his own art, something which artists rare- 
ly do, contenting themselves with the practice of 



364 THESE MANY YEARS 

it. I soon saw that Booth's filial devotion to his 
father had led him to learn all he could about his 
father's rivals, especially the foremost of them all, 
Edmund Kean, and that he had therefore been lured 
into wider reading about the Kembles. I saw also 
that Irving was not at all familiar with the his- 
trionic history of his own country, and that he 
neither confessed his ignorance nor pretended to 
knowledge that he did not possess. He let Booth 
talk, and from time to time, threw in an anecdote 
that had come to him by oral tradition. I recall 
this as a remarkable exhibition of perfect poise and 
self-control in self-defense. And what I noted that 
evening confirmed in my mind the truth of the cur- 
rent rumor that Irving did not himself compose the 
addresses and the articles which he signed. 

Of this I had further corroborative evidence later. 
At different times Irving lectured at Harvard on 
'English Actors' and at Columbia on 'Macbeth,' and 
he also contributed occasional articles on the art 
of acting and on Shakspere to the magazines. I do 
not doubt that the opinions herein expressed, the 
main points, were Irving's own; but the looking up 
of quotations and the ultimate literary expression 
he confided to a confidential secretary, following the 
example of those members of Parliament and of 
Congress who have their speeches written for them. 
Irving's confidential secretary was a man named 
Louis F. Austin, who wrote a book about his employer 
which he signed with a pen-name, "F. Daly." In 
London only a few months after our Kinsmen supper 
I was dining with a friend, who showed me the 



AMONG THE PLAYERS 365 

title-page of one of Irving' s addresses with this 
legend written boldly across it: "To my friend 

, with the compliments of the author, Louis 

F. Austin." This seemed to me then, as it seems to 
me now, a contemptible example of treachery to a 
generous master. 

If Irving had ever known this I cannot but think 
that it would have pained him, altho he was a mag- 
nanimous man and altho he had a sense of humor 
sufficient to permit his enjoyment of a joke on him- 
self. One of these jokes on himself I heard from his 
close friend Walter Pollock. Irving won his first 
success as Hamlet while the Lyceum was still under 
the management of "Colonel" Bateman; for sev- 
eral years before Bateman took the theater it had 
been devoted to comic opera. As the dramatic 
critic of the Saturday Review, Pollock had attended 
the first performance of 'Hamlet,' but before writ- 
ing his article he went again later in the week and 
he found himself by the side of a lank Dundreary- 
ish man who became increasingly restless as the first 
act progressed. When the curtain fell, he seemed 
at a loss what to do ; but finally he turned to Pollock. 
"I beg your pardon," he began, "but do you know 
this play?" Pollock admitted his familiarity with 
the piece. "Very well, then," was the relieved reply; 
"perhaps you can tell me if that tall, thin young man 
in black appears again?" Pollock responded that 
the tall, thin young man in black was the chief per- 
sonage in the play and would therefore appear very 
frequently. "Ah!" said his neighbor, disappointed 
in the burlesque he had expected to find at that 



366 THESE MANY YEARS 

theater. "Ah! Then in that case I'm off !" And 
he took his hat and departed. And Pollock went 
back to Irving' s dressing-room and told him, altho 
I cannot be sure that the actor's laughter was either 
hearty or sincere. 



It has often been pointed out that great actors 
rarely do anything for the drama of their own 
language in their own time, preferring to measure 
themselves with their mighty predecessors in the 
great parts of the great plays of the past. It was 
said of John Kemble that he thought all the good 
parts had been written. Coquelin is the most ob- 
vious exception to this general rule, for he created 
a host of characters in plays by his contemporaries 
even if he won his major reputation by his perform- 
ance of the characters Moliere had composed for 
his own acting. Neither Booth nor Jefferson was 
ever on the lookout for new plays; and altho Irving 
brought out more novelties than either of the Ameri- 
cans, no one of these has established itself in the 
theater now that it is no longer supported by his 
authority, not even the ' Becket ' of Tennyson or the 
'Charles I' of W. G. Wills. It has even been sug- 
gested, and with not a little show of reason, that 
the contemporary drama is likely to languish when 
the stage is occupied by actors of commanding 
power and that it is only when the actor cannot 
domineer over the playwright that the contemporary 
drama has its chance to expand and to reveal the 
best of which it is capable. 



AMONG THE PLAYERS 367 

But if Edwin Booth did nothing for the drama of 
his language, he did a great deal for his profession. 
He founded The Players, a club intended primarily 
for the actor, the dramatist, and the manager, where 
they might mingle at ease with the practitioners of 
the allied arts of literature and music, painting, sculp- 
ture, and architecture. Booth had long been con- 
sidering a gift for the benefit of his calling. Edwin 
Forrest had left his house and his fortune to shelter 
superannuated members of the profession; but 
Booth preferred to make provision for the actors 
while they were still on the stage. He consulted 
his friends, Lawrence Barrett, E. C. Benedict, and 
Thomas Bailey Aldrich. It was on Benedict's 
yacht that he finally decided to establish a club; 
it was Aldrich who suggested its name. Booth 
communicated his intention to Daly and to Palmer; 
and early in 1888 Daly gave a luncheon to which he 
invited the organizers of the new club — and on 
the back of my bill-of-fare I find the autographs of 
Lawrence Barrett, William Bispham, Edwin Booth, 
S. L. Clemens, Augustin Daly, Joseph F. Daly, 
John Drew, Harry Edwards, Laurence Hutton, 
Joseph Jefferson, John A. Lane, James Lewis, 
Brander Matthews, Stephen Henry Olin, A. M. 
Palmer, and William T. Sherman. 

Thereupon Booth bought 16 Gramercy Park; 
and Stanford White altered it and decorated it so 
skilfully and so tastefully that it looked friendly 
and homelike on the night of its opening — the last 
night of 1889, when the donor read his deed of gift 
and The Players took possession of their future 



368 THESE MANY YEARS 

abode. In view of this project Booth had long 
been gathering portraits of actors, and he had pur- 
chased a similar collection made by his brother-in- 
law, John S. Clarke. The histrionic gallery of The 
Players is now worthy of comparison with that of 
the Garrick Club in London, which possesses no 
finer portrait than the picture of Booth himself, 
painted by John S. Sargent and presented by E. C. 
Benedict. Among the paintings that Booth had 
acquired was a portrait of Washington, but he 
hesitated to give us this with the others because 
it seemed out of place. He expressed this doubt 
to Aldrich, who instantly replied: "I see no objec- 
tion to putting Washington by the side of the actors. 
He was our Leading Man !" 

As a member of the committee on literature and art 
I helped to arrange the books given to us by Booth 
and by Barrett; and I found wall-space in the hall 
for a long sequence of engraved portraits of the 
English Kings which had served Booth in his per- 
formances of one or another of Shakspere's histor- 
ical plays. I told the man who was putting up the 
rails to accommodate these prints to arrange .them in 
chronological order; and when I saw them on the 
walls I perceived that he had misinterpreted this 
direction. He had put them in alphabetical order, 
the four Georges preceding the eight Henrys, with the 
four Williams bringing up the end of the procession. 

From the very beginning the new club justified 
the hopes of its founder. In it, amid congenial as- 
sociations, he spent the last years of his life. In it at 
last he died, in the room which is kept just as it was 



AMONG THE PLAYERS 369 

when he was seized with his final attack. From the 
very beginning The Players had an atmosphere of 
its own which has endured for now a quarter of a 
century. It has its genial traditions and it has ful- 
filled its founder's purpose. Perhaps some part of 
its charm may be due to the gentle influence of 
Booth himself, surviving year after year. A British 
actor who had been a guest of The Players for a 
month once put this into words, "I don't see how 
it is here," he said, "but you seem to be different. 
On our side we talk about Irving or Henry Irving, 
but here you generally speak of the man who gave 
you this club as Mr. Booth." I had not before 
noted that this was our practice but I recognized it 
immediately as an instinctive tribute of involuntary 
respect. 

VI 

It is sometimes asserted that actors are a curiously 
self -centered race of beings, often unduly conceited 
and even vainglorious. William Archer has sug- 
gested as an explanation that the circumstances of his 
art compel the comedian and the tragedian to per- 
sistent thought about his own person, since he has 
always to live in a room lined with mirrors. What- 
ever justice there may be in the charge against cer- 
tain members of the profession, I should like to put 
on record here my firm conviction that it does not 
lie against the leaders of the craft whom I have 
had the privilege of knowing intimately. Booth 
and Irving, Jefferson and Coquelin and Barnay 



370 THESE MANY YEARS 

were as little forthputting or self -valuing or intoler- 
ant as any men I have ever met. I do not mean 
to suggest that they were not severally conscious 
of their respective positions at the head of their 
profession. That knowledge they could not fail 
to possess. But they were none of them grudgingly 
jealous, as Macready disclosed himself to be in his 
diary; they were not self-assertive, being preserved 
from this by their indisputable eminence. In their 
several ways they were all modest, with a modesty 
not frequently found among artists in whatever art. 
With no lack of the self-confidence necessary to 
their achievement they seemed to be simple-minded 
and without pretense. Perhaps this simple-minded- 
ness was a little less evident in Coquelin and in 
Irving than in Booth and in Jefferson. Nothing 
could be more modest than a remark Jefferson once 
made to me after he had been praising his half- 
brother, Charles Burke, the original performer of 
Rip Van Winkle: "If my brother Charley had only 
lived, the world would never have heard of me!" 
This modesty did not prevent Jefferson from having 
the courage of his convictions. He knew what he 
liked and he knew why he liked it. I heard him 
say that the performance of Weber and Fields and 
Sam Bernard in the famous "skindicate" scene in 
one of their conglomerates of music and fun, was 
the finest piece of comic acting he had seen in New 
York that winter. On the other hand, he did not 
relish the ultra-veracity of 'Cavalleria Rusticana' 
as this was revealed by Duse and her excellent 
company on her first visit to America. He deplored 



AMONG THE PLAYERS 371 

the lack of a more poetic atmosphere for the tragic 
story. "It's altogether too realistic," he declared. 
"Why, you could count the fleas in that Italian vil- 
lage!" I ventured to suggest that if it had been 
a real Italian village, he could not have counted the 
fleas. "What I mean is that there was no romance 
about it," he continued; "that girl wasn't seduced 
in the moonlight. She went into the barn." 

I regret now that I could not have capped this 
with the witty remark of another friend to the effect 
that "Duse overacted her under-acting." The quip 
had not then been uttered; but I have no doubt 
that Jefferson would have adopted it, if he could have 
heard it. 

During one of Coquelin's engagements in New 
York a supper was given to him in the private din- 
ing-room of The Players; and I chanced to sit side 
by side of the leading man of the French company. 
The next time I saw Coquelin, he asked my opinion 
of the performer. "Well," I responded, "he is a 
good enough actor, but I did not find him very in- 
telligent." And Coquelin instantly returned: "But 
he has the intelligence of his profession. That is 
all any artist really needs in his calling, whether 
he is actor or musician or painter. Take Meissonier, 
for example, our greatest painter. Well, he is an 
old chump ! — c'est un vieil ganache" This explains 
our frequent disappointment when we meet a prac- 
titioner of any one of the arts, whose work we have 
admired and who strikes us in conversation with 
him as less richly endowed than we had expected. 
We had looked for general intelligence, whereas 



372 THESE MANY YEARS 

all the artist had was the specific intelligence of his 
profession, the native gift for his own art. On the 
other hand, the chiefs in any calling are likely also 
to possess a full share of general intelligence. 
Coquelin himself abounded in it, and so did Jeffer- 
son, as I had the privilege once of observing on a 
particular occasion. 

When Booth died we elected Jefferson as the 
president of The Players. I was then a member of 
the Board of Directors, and we soon observed that 
our new presiding officer was wholly inexperienced 
in parliamentary procedure. We had to remind 
him to put the question and to declare the result 
of our votes. Unpractised as he was, his native 
shrewdness stood him in stead of experience. At 
one of our meetings we had to face a very awkward 
situation, complicated by the personal relation of 
two members of the Board with an absent member 
whose wilful negligence of duty called for discipline. 
The matter was brought before Jefferson, who knew 
nothing at all about the facts; and it was a delight 
to see the clearness and the certainty with which 
his mind worked as he slowly possessed himself of 
all the details. When we adjourned after our hour 
of painful tension, one of my associates as a director, 
who was one of the younger leaders of the bar, said 
to me on the stairs: "Did you see what the old man 
did? He deduced the governing principle and 
applied it unerringly to a set of facts wholly novel 
to him. That is the faculty we need in the members 
of the Supreme Court — and don't always get !" 

Besides this keen intelligence, Jefferson also had 



AMONG THE PLAYERS 373 

a quick wit. In the last years of his life we gave him 
a reception at the Authors Club, at which he made 
a felicitous address partly about the art of acting 
and partly about himself, ending, as was his wont, 
by expressing his readiness to answer any questions 
that might be put to him. In the hope of heading 
off futile queries about the Baconian hypothesis, 
I rose and asked him what had been his most un- 
fortunate experience on the stage. He told us that 
he had had more than one that he did not like to 
remember, but that perhaps the saddest was when he 
was put forward at the early age of five to sing the 
'Star-Spangled Banner' and when the words of the 
second stanza escaped from his memory. When 
he had made an end of his amusing story, another 
member of the Authors inquired what had been the 
pleasantest experience of the actor's life, where- 
upon Jefferson smiled that winning smile of his and 
at once replied: "Why, this reception this evening, 
of course!" 



CHAPTER XVI 
ADVENTURES IN STORY-TELLING 



DURING these years of occasional play-writing 
and of continuous playgoing I was ply- 
ing my trade as a man of letters, laboring 
in a variety of fields. I did not cease writing book- 
reviews for the Saturday Review until 1894 and for 
the Nation until 1895; and I continued to contrib- 
ute irregularly to the Critic. Papers of mine on 
divers topics appeared in different magazines. For 
a series in the Forum, for example, I prepared an 
article on 'Books that have helped me.' Probably 
I took the theater as a topic more than any other; 
and in 1894 I gathered into a little book half-a-score 
of my 'Studies of the Stage.' This tiny tome was 
uniform with a volume issued a year or two earlier, 
called 'Americanisms and Briticisms with Other 
Essays on Other Isms,' in which I had collected my 
earliest inquiries into the verbal niceties of our 
language, as it is spoken and written in the United 
States and in Great Britain. 

In 1895 I sent forth a volume entitled 'Book- 
bindings Old and New: Notes of a Book-lover,' 
wherein I sheltered essays on different aspects of 
the bibliopegic art as I had studied it in the libraries 
of London and Paris and at the successive inter - 

374 



ADVENTURES IN STORY-TELLING 375 

national exhibitions on one side or the other of the 
Atlantic. I fear that the bibliophiles of the strictest 
sect would deny my right of admission to their 
ancient brotherhood, because I have always been 
more interested in the insides of books than in the 
out sides. Yet even if I am excluded from the fra- 
ternity I have found profit in my diligent inquiry 
into the practices of the leading masters of the 
bookbinder's craft, living and dead; and this in- 
vestigation proved to be more fertile than I had 
expected when I drifted into it, because it made 
plain to me, as nothing had done previously, the 
irrefragable interdependence of the decorative arts, 
any one of which is likely at any moment to influence 
the development of any other. It instructed me as 
much as it amused me to trace the appropriation of 
patterns from oriental tiles for the book-covers of 
the Italian Renascence and to observe the borrow- 
ing by the French binders of the eighteenth cen- 
tury of motives originally devised by the contem- 
porary craftsmen in wrought-iron. 

In this same year, 1895, I was lucky enough to 
be awarded the second prize in a contest for a de- 
tective-story. The first prize was taken by Miss 
Mary E. Wilkins, who founded her tale, the 'Long 
Arm,' on the unsolved mystery of the notorious 
Borden murder. My own effort was less sanguinary, 
as it dealt only with the exposure of the purloiner 
of an intangible object. In other words, the thing 
stolen was a business secret; and I so arranged the 
incidents of my narrative that the thief should be 
identified by a camera concealed in a clock and 



376 THESE MANY YEARS 

taking every ten minutes a photograph of the safe 
in which the private papers were sheltered. I 
called my short-story the 'Twinkling of an Eye'; 
and plumed myself not a little on the novelty of 
my device. But my pride had a fall, shortly after 
my narrative had appeared in a heterogeny of 
Sunday papers, when I received a letter from a 
midwestern correspondent informing me that he 
had made use of precisely the same expedient to 
catch the unknown robber of his tash-drawer. I 
accepted this as added evidence that fact is likely 
always to keep ahead of fiction and that the inge- 
nuity of a story-teller is certain to come off second 
best in any competition with the infinite resource of 
the practical world. In the case of the 'Twinkling 
of an Eye' I had at least the satisfaction of ascer- 
taining that I had invented my fiction, even if it had 
not appeared in print before it came into existence 
as an actual fact. 

Perhaps I may permit myself here to mention 
another invention of mine, more strictly within my 
own field as a man of letters. It was, I think in 
this same year, 1895, or in the year after, that I 
received a visit from a book-canvasser who be- 
lieved that there was money in a series of volumes 
containing extracts from the great writers of all 
languages and all countries. In going from house 
to house selling subscription-books he had come 
to the conclusion that a comprehensive anthology 
of prose and verse in twenty or thirty substantial 
volumes would be purchased by a very large number 
of fairly well-to-do Americans who would accept 



ADVENTURES IN STORY-TELLING 377 

this series more or less as a substitute for a bookcase 
filled with miscellaneous volumes. It was to pro- 
vide good reading in all departments of literature 
and it ought also to be available constantly as a 
work of reference. 

My visitor told me that he had submitted his 
project to a publishing house, which had taken it up 
eagerly; and he was now in search of an editor. He 
had approached Charles Dudley Warner, whose 
hesitation he hoped to be able to overcome. As 
the scheme was set before me it was rather shadowy ; 
and neither its originator nor its future publishers 
knew exactly what they wanted, altho they had 
already employed compilers to select appropriate 
extracts. I told the canvasser that he needed a 
clear plan for the whole undertaking and any money 
would be wasted which was spent before a definite 
prospectus had been drawn up. To this he answered 
that he had come to me in the hope that I would 
prepare an outline on which they could get to work 
at once. He explained he knew how to sell books, 
but he did not know what to put in the books he 
was going to sell; he complimented me by calling 
me an expert in literature and as such I was invited 
to give my professional advice. The project seemed 
to me promising and I informed him that I was quite 
willing to draw up a proper plan if I could be as- 
sured of a proper fee for my services, such as a 
lawyer would charge for his opinion or a physician 
for a momentous consultation. I named a modest 
figure, which was accepted without protest; and the 
next week I met the canvasser, the publishers, — and 



378 THESE MANY YEARS 

also Warner, who had decided to accept the editor- 
ship if he could find out exactly what he was expected 
to edit. It was at this conference that we came to 
a clear understanding as to the content, the scale, 
and the appropriate contributors to the bulky series 
of tomes which constituted Warner's 'Library of 
the World's Best Literature.' The plan accepted 
that afternoon was amplified as the work progressed, 
but it was not modified, that is to say, it was never 
materially departed from; in fact, it has since served 
as the model for half-a-dozen similar ventures. 
Warner invited me to be one of the advisory board; 
and at his request I prepared the introductory 
biographical criticisms of Moliere, Beaumarchais, 
and Sheridan. 

II 

I have grouped together in the foregoing para- 
graphs several varied literary activities, so that I 
might deal consecutively with my contemporary 
writing of fiction. I have already spoken of my 
earlier short-stories and of the 'Last Meeting/ 
which was a rather brief novel when it ought to have 
been a rather long short-story. The 'Last Meeting' 
had been published in 1885; and for the next half- 
dozen years I confined myself to short-stories, still 
composed more or less under the influence of the 
clever and artificial tales of the author of 'Marjory 
Daw.' Then quite unexpectedly, since I had only 
very infrequently contributed to their magazine, 
the editors of St. Nicholas suggested my writing 
a juvenile serial. I appreciated the compliment of 



ADVENTURES IN STORY-TELLING 379 

this proposal and I accepted it with the proviso that 
I was to be released if I could not hit on a theme for 
a tale likely to hold the attention of healthy young 
Americans. 

I examined my episodic recollections of my own 
school-days in the vain hope that I might be able 
to reveal myself as the author of an American 'Tom 
Brown at Rugby. ' I soon saw that I could replevin 
nothing of value from my years at Anthon's or 
Churchill's or Charlier's, altho I did recapture cer- 
tain boyish traits floating in my memory of that 
remote past which most unimaginative men leave 
behind them once for all when they have come to 
man's estate. Of course, I reread 'Tom Brown' 
itself; and I was disappointed to perceive its crudity 
of construction, its amateurishness of method, altho 
the salient episodes, like the fight with Slogger 
Williams, were still instinct with vitality. I am 
inclined to believe now that the immediate popu- 
larity of that classic of British boyhood may have 
been due mainly to this heroic combat. He was a 
true boy who, when his mother proposed to read to 
him out of the Bible, asked her to pick out "the 
fightingest parts." 

I reread also Aldrich's 'Story of a Bad Boy,' the 
truly autobiographic Tom Bailey, and the 'Adven- 
tures of Tom Sawyer.' These are books that no 
boy's library should be without, and I resolved that 
whenever I might write my juvenile serial story, 
it should have a good fight in it, and its young hero 
should be called Tom, to mate with Tom Brown, 
Tom Bailey and Tom Sawyer. And quite by acci- 



380 THESE MANY YEARS 

dent one day there came to me the germ of a plot, 
the long hunt of a New York lad for a sum of money 
stolen from his great-great-grandfather in the Rev- 
olutionary War. With this as the center of my 
story I was soon able to devise a succession of epi- 
sodes and to people my plot with a group of con- 
trasted juvenile characters, several of them being 
suggested to me more or less directly by young 
people and by grown-ups of my acquaintance. 

As the incident of the Revolutionary War which 
was at the core of my story had to be the battle of 
Harlem Heights, I was forced to lay the scene of my 
tale in and around Riverside Drive, which had then 
just begun to be built up. I opened my narrative 
with a description of this region then in course of 
transition from a semi-rural neighborhood to a 
completely urban community; and I immediately 
introduced my group of boys gathered about a bon- 
fire on Election night in a canon formed by a street 
which had been cut down to the grade of the River- 
side Drive, leaving cliffs of rock towering on both 
sides. Less than half-a-dozen years after I had vis- 
ited this territory for the first time to study the 
scenery of my story, Columbia College moved from 
Forty-ninth Street to Morningside Heights, a re- 
moval which led us to sell our house in Eighteenth 
Street and to buy another on the corner of West 
End Avenue and Ninety -third Street. And to my 
great surprise, when I came to reconnoiter my new 
surroundings, I found that I was then a resident of 
the very street ending in a cafion in which my 
youthful band had made its first appearance. 



ADVENTURES IN STORY-TELLING 381 

'Tom Paulding, a Tale of Treasure-trove in the 
Streets of New York,' was published as a book in 
the fall of 1892, after having done its duty first 
in twelve numbers of St. Nicholas. While it was 
in the course of serial publication, and when only 
five or six parts had been printed, Thomas Went- 
worth Higginson wrote me that his little daughter 
was following the fortunes of my hero, as these 
were disclosed month by month. He informed me 
further that when she had finished the current in- 
stalment she laid down the magazine in disgust 
with the remark that she "did not think Mr. Brander 
Matthews a very good story-teller." Her father 
requested her reason for this severe criticism. 
"Why," she answered, "don't you see? He always 
stops the story at the most interesting place." 

Ill 

It was possibly because I had frequently crossed 
the Atlantic in my boyhood for prolonged visits, 
and had thus become familiar with many of the capi- 
tals of Europe, that I came early to an appreciation 
of the individuality, the picturesqueness, and the 
charm of New York. I found that Bunner shared 
this feeling with me; and we used to wonder how it 
was that so few novels had then been written with 
this city as their background. When we first dis- 
cussed the topic, in 1879 or in 1880, we could count 
on the fingers of one hand the works of fiction which 
had their scene laid in the Empire City. There 
was the 'Potiphar Papers' of Curtis, if that could 



382 THESE MANY YEARS 

fairly be termed a novel, which may be doubted; 
and there was the 'Cecil Dreeme' of Theodore 
Winthrop, to be considered rather as a romance. 

In fact, the novel of Boston was then more abun- 
dant than the novel of New York; and Howells 
was then describing the manners and customs of 
Bostonians, preparatory to his removal to New 
York, where he was to lay the scene of his 'Hazard 
of New Fortunes' (which did not appear until 1889). 
Before the publication of Howells's significant inter- 
pretation of the life of the largest city in America, 
we had only Henry James's 'Washington Square' 
and W. H. Bishop's 'House of a Merchant Prince.' 
When this last book came out there was a courte- 
ous debate between Bishop and Bunner on the possi- 
bilities of New York as a field for fiction. Bunner 
soon turned from criticism to creation, and in the 
' Midge, ' in which he gave a sympathetic study of the 
French quarter near Washington Square, and in his 
more ambitious 'Story of a New York House,' he 
proved by example that the possibilities of the field 
were more tempting than his adversary in the dis- 
cussion had been willing to admit. I must not 
neglect to mention the succession of painful examina- 
tions of different aspects of New York undertaken by 
Edgar Fawcett in a series of stories, wherein the 
aspiration of the author was more evident than his 
inspiration. 

The field was here, and it was fertile, and further- 
more, it had not been pre-empted. Yet there were 
very few of us who then recognized the richness 
of the soil or who had confidence in the crop that 



ADVENTURES IN STORY-TELLING 383 

could be raised. London had been painted on 
the broad canvases of a host of robust novelists, 
even if the minor aspects of her life had not tempted 
the more delicate miniaturists of the short-story; 
but New York had not yet attracted either the 
novelists or the tellers of brief tales. Her streets 
were paved with gold as opulently in those days as 
they are now; but the men of letters who strayed 
here and there in her thorofares had not the vision 
to perceive that they were living in a Golconda of 
opportunity. Paris had been glorified by an im- 
mortal succession of men of genius and of men of 
talent, from Victor Hugo and Balzac to Daudet and 
Zola. The panorama of Parisian society had been 
boldly brushed in by generation after generation of 
keen-eyed and skilful interpreters of its myriad 
manifestations. Even if we in America were not 
yet ripe for a great novelist to celebrate our city by 
the sea, I failed to understand how it was that we 
had not developed short-story writers akin to Halevy 
and Coppee and Maupassant, writers inspired by a 
like ambition even if they could not attain to a like 
art. 

I need not say here that it was not with any inten- 
tion of measuring myself with these masters of fic- 
tion, major and minor, that I began to write short- 
stories saturated with local color. My motive was 
at once more modest and far simpler. I attempted 
to catch certain aspects and attributes of New York 
merely because I found keen enjoyment in making 
these snap-shots of the metropolis, and because I 
kept on observing conditions and situations which 



384 THESE MANY YEARS 

seemed to me to be essentially characteristic of the 
city I loved. There were few in those days of the 
late seventies and early eighties of the last century 
daring enough to admit any affection for New York; 
and there were almost none ready to vaunt it. The 
inhabitants of New York were at that time perhaps 
a little too close to the draft-riots, to the Tweed 
ring, to the Black Friday of Jim Fisk and Jay Gould, 
to have any civic pride; and they were almost 
equally devoid of civic consciousness. I rejoiced 
that I was a citizen of no mean city, and so did 
Bunner, who had already rimed some of his lilting 
'Ballades of the Town.' We saw no just cause for 
the constant disparagement of New York or for the 
deprecatory tone of its sparse defenders. New York 
was what it was; and we loved it for what it was, 
even if we hoped that it would be more lovable as 
the years rolled on. 

One of the characteristic customs of New York, 
the Election-night bonfire — a custom carried over 
to America from the mother country in the old co- 
lonial days, when it celebrated the discomfiture of 
Guy Fawkes — I had introduced into ' Tom Paul- 
ding.' But there were many others crying aloud, so 
it seemed to me, to be commemorated however in- 
adequately. There was the extraordinary spectacle 
presented by Fifth Avenue on the afternoon of 
Thanksgiving Day when the horns of many coaches 
proclaimed that the intercollegiate football game had 
been won and lost — a spectacle which was soon to 
cease to be visible, so rapidly do customs come and 
go in this swift life of ours. There was the Me- 



ADVENTURES IX STORY-TELLING 3S5 

morial Day parade: there was the private view of 
the National Academy of Design: there was the out- 
pouring of families into lower Central Park on a 
Sunday afternoon in early spring: there was the 
annual Horse Show in Madison Square Garden in 
the late fall: and there was the roof-garden show on 
the top of some building in the middle of the sum- 
mer. There was Mulberry Bend in the swelter of a 
hot wave: and there was Wall Street blankly un- 
inhabited on a holiday. There were the bobtailed 
cars, and the shrieking trains of the elevated rail- 
road with clouds of steam foaming down to become 
iridescent as the rays of the setting sun shot thru 
them. There was color everywhere, unending move- 
ment, incessant vitality. . 

In the years that followed the publication of 
'Tom Paulding* I put forth a series of thumb-nail 
sketches of one or another of these significant mani- 
festations of New York. Perhaps my little etch- 
ings, never deeply bitten into the plate, were far 
more insignificant than I liked to think them: vet 
they had the merit of sincerity and of directness. 
They had furthermore the merit of knowledge, for 
I never went out of my depth, avoiding those many 
aspects of metropolitan existence that I could not 
adequately interpret because they were beyond my 
ken. Sometimes I was able to utilize a real happen- 
ing, brought to me by word of mouth and there- 
fore more malleable than if it had been snatched from 
the newspaper: and sometimes the germ of my story 
had to evolve by spontaneous generation in my 
own head, conjuring up the ghost of a plot to per- 



386 THESE MANY YEARS 

mit me to reproduce the atmosphere of the special 
spot and the special moment I had chosen. 

When I had written a dozen of these urban im- 
pressions, scarcely solid enough in texture to be 
termed short-stories, I gathered them into a volume 
called ' Vignettes of Manhattan,' and published in 
1894. I dedicated it to Theodore Roosevelt, whom I 
had not long before persuaded to write a book about 
his native city for the series of 'Historic Towns,' 
edited by E. A. Freeman. Three years later I was 
ready with a second dozen, again one for every 
month in the year; and this volume was entitled 
'Outlines in Local Color.' But it was not until 
eighteen years after 'Vignettes of Manhattan,' long 
after I had finally renounced the writing of fiction, 
that I found another dozen of these sketches had 
been accumulating and so it was that I was able to 
send forth in 1912 a final volume of 'Vistas of New 
York.' Whatever may be the literary worth of this 
triptych of the Empire City, I cannot but hope 
that these pen-and-ink sketches of mine may per- 
haps be useful to a social historian in the twenty- 
first century when he is at a loss for the lighter 
literature which may help him to understand and to 
interpret the serried facts he will have disinterred 
from hundreds of less vivacious documents. 



IV 

In the same years in which I was making these 
three dozen remarques, if I may so call them, my 
ambition to chronicle the movement of the mighty 



ADVENTURES IN STORY-TELLING 387 

city led me to attempt three larger pictures of life 
in Manhattan. The first of these novels of New 
York was 'His Father's Son,' which was issued in 
1895, and in which I utilized my experiences in Wall 
Street a score years earlier. Altho I had never been 
allured by the hope that I could guess at the vagaries 
of the market, I had spent my days in the midst of 
those who had deluded themselves into the belief 
that they could win against the odds, almost as 
mathematically certain as those of the gaming- 
table; and from the windows of my father's office 
in Broad Street almost next door to the Stock Ex- 
change I had looked down on the speculators for a 
quick turn as dispassionately and as seriously as I 
had gazed at the gamblers who sat intent about 
the roulette-wheel and the trente-et-quarante tables 
at Homburg and Baden-Baden when I was a boy. 
I utilized in my plot several actual happenings that 
had come to my knowledge, striving to be as ac- 
curate as possible in my presentation of the tur- 
moil of the street, with its intrigues and its be- 
trayals. 

When my story was complete Bunner read it in 
manuscript and I made plain any point which was 
not perfectly clear to him in his ignorance of the 
manners and customs of Wall Street. Another 
kind friend, more familiar with the intricacies of 
speculation, also lent me his aid, and I made straight 
the occasional slips which he had detected in my 
account of the procedure of the slaves of the ticker. 
The tone of my tale was quiet and its manner was 
as unsensational as may be; yet I believed then, 



388 THESE MANY YEARS 

and indeed I believe now, that the picture I painted 
was true to life. 

My second novel of New York was called 'A Con- 
fident To-morrow' and it appeared in 1899. It had 
for its hero a young man from the country coming 
up to the conquest of the city; he was a newspaper 
man and the action took place wholly in literary 
circles among the men of letters and the editors 
and the illustrators whom I had come to know in the 
intimacy of daily association. Here again I was 
able to utilize things seen by me and persons known 
by me; and here again the action was simple and 
straightforward, with the emphasis rather on what 
the characters were than on what they did. 'A 
Confident To-morrow' was my effort to translate 
into fiction the men of my own calling; it was my 
remote imitation of 'Pendennis,' a novel that al- 
most every novelist is moved to imitate sooner or 
later in the practice of his art. Its characters were 
less boldly drawn than those I had set in motion 
in 'His Father's Son,' and its action was less signifi- 
cant, yet it had been constructed with the same 
care and with the same punctilious conscientiousness 
in its accessories. 

The third and last of my novels of New York was 
the 'Action and the Word,' which appeared in the 
spring of 1900 and in which I essayed a picture of 
fashionable life, with its frivolities and its artificiali- 
ties. In 'His Father's Son' the interest lay in the 
relation of parent and child; in 'A Confident To- 
morrow' it revolved around the ardent young fel- 
low who had come to town to push his fortunes; 



ADVENTURES IN STORY-TELLING 389 

and in the 'Action and the Word' these heroes, old 
and young, yielded the stage to a heroine, whom I 
strove to make as charming as possible in spite of 
her whims and her wilfulness and her unexpected 
transitions of temper and of mood. 

It is now approaching a score of years since the 
latest of these novels was composed and I can look 
back at them with a disinterestedness not easy of 
attainment when they were fresh from the work- 
shop. They were well received by the reviewers 
in the newspapers and by my fellow-craftsmen in 
the practice of fiction. They did not sell badly, 
but they failed to become "best sellers." Their 
merits were modest, perhaps too modest to force 
them outside of the inner circle who relish deliberate 
workmanship. I am inclined to think now that they 
were perhaps a little too quiet in tone, too subdued, 
too moderate, to thrust themselves into the favor of 
the general public. 

And it may be also that they suffered from another 
defect due to my contemporary practice of the art 
of the drama; they were perhaps a little too swift 
to give the average reader the time needed to take 
in the full meaning of what was said and of what was 
done. The dialog had the compact compression de- 
manded by the rigid limitation of time in the theater 
when there are only two hours for the traffic of the 
stage, a compression unnecessary and even out of 
place in the more leisurely narrative of a novel. 
That is to say, my stories lacked the dilation and 
the dilution needed in pure narrative when words 
and deeds are not reinforced by the voice and the 



390 THESE MANY YEARS 

gesture of actors actually before the eye, and thus 
driving home every point by dint of simultaneous 
visual and auditory sensation. 

When I sat down to write one after another of 
these representations of life in New York as I saw 
it and as I interpreted it, I had no belief that I was 
engaged in creating that intangible and evasive 
entity, the Great American Novel, for I was not 
simple-minded enough to suppose that I had it in 
me to compass this feat; and I had already come to 
the conclusion that these United States were too 
many and too various for any one work of fiction 
ever to include enough of their many-colored spec- 
trums to be accepted as satisfactorily representative 
of the whole country. It has always seemed to me 
as futile and as foolish to aspire after the Great 
American Novel as it would be to try and decide 
which is the Great French Novel or the Great British 
Novel. Nor when I undertook my three studies of 
life in this city did I even feel any ambition to write 
the Great New York Novel, for I knew the town 
well enough to feel assured that it is almost as 
various as the whole country, and that it is far 
too complex to permit any one novelist to concentrate 
the essence of it in any one novel. My humbler 
attempt was to fix one or another of the shifting 
scenes of life in this great city; in fact, I was really 
seeking the same goal in these three novels that I 
was seeking at the same time in my three volumes 
of the 'Vignettes,' which were also outlines in local 
color. 



CHAPTER XVII 
A PROFESSOR OF DRAMATIC LITERATURE 



IT has seemed best to deal in separate chapters 
with my novel-writing, my play-writing, and 
my playgoing, even at the risk of a slight 
confusion in the direct chronological sequence of 
these records. As a matter of fact, my playgoing 
and play-writing and novel-writing were simul- 
taneous; and contemporary with a large part of all 
three of them was another series of experiences, as 
a lecturer for a year and thereafter as a professor 
at Columbia College. In the spring of 1891 H. H. 
Boyesen dropped in one day to tell me that the 
professor of English, Thomas R. Price, was going 
to be absent in Europe the following winter; and 
he inquired if I would entertain a proposition to act 
as substitute while Price was away. I was com- 
pletely taken by surprise as I had never contemplated 
the possibility of entering the teaching profession, 
even for a single year. 

Yet the more I considered the suggestion the 
better I liked it. Professor Price came to talk it 
over with me; and not long after I had a conference 
with Seth Low, who had assumed the presidency of 
Columbia only a few months before. So it came 
about that when the college began its year in Oc- 

391 



392 THESE MANY YEARS 

tober, 1891, I found myself engaged to conduct 
three courses, open to seniors and to such graduate 
students as might present themselves. And in the 
following spring the trustees created a new pro- 
fessorship of literature, to which I was appointed. 
I may anticipate here to record that the title of my 
chair was changed in 1899, when I became pro- 
fessor of dramatic literature — mine being, so far 
as I know, the first professorship of the drama to be 
founded in any English-speaking university. 

There is an Arab proverb to the effect that "No 
man is called of God till he is forty." Whatever 
the wisdom of this assertion — and it would be easy 
to cite abundant evidence in its support — it was 
my good fortune to enter upon a new kind of work in 
the very year when I had attained the age of two- 
score. The profession for which my father had 
trained me I had never been permitted to practise, 
and the profession for which I had trained myself I 
had been able to practise only intermittently. Now, 
when five of my years had elapsed beyond the half 
of the allotted threescore and ten, I found myself 
engaged in the practice of a third profession for 
which I had had no training at all; and it is in the 
practice of this third profession that I have spent 
now more than a quarter of a century. 

Not only had I had no experience in teaching but 
I had never been called upon to consider its prin- 
ciples or to bestow on it even cursory attention. 
I knew a dozen or more of the teaching staff of Co- 
lumbia whom I had met at the Authors Club and 
elsewhere; but my talks with them had never 



DRAMATIC LITERATURE 393 

chanced to turn on the principles or the practice 
of the art of education. All that I really knew 
was that teaching was truly an art and that there- 
fore I should have to acquire it somehow — and prob- 
ably at the expense of my earliest classes. For- 
tunately, during that first year when I was serving 
as a substitute for Professor Price I was allowed to 
choose the subjects of my three courses of lectures; 
and therefore, as I selected American literature, 
modern fiction, and English versification, three topics 
with which I was already fairly familiar, I had not 
to get up the matter of my instruction, being thereby 
free to devote my whole energy to the manner 
whereby I might best convey to the members of my 
classes what I had to impart. 

It is evidence of my lack of acquaintance with 
the program of studies in American colleges when I 
began to teach that I selected these three topics, 
which were all three of them almost if not quite 
absent from college catalogs at that time. There 
were one or two professors in the English department 
of Dartmouth and of Cornell, for example, who were 
already considering the careers of the chief American 
poets and prose-writers; but these were not more 
than two or three at the most in those distant days, 
common as is the consideration of our American 
authors now in all our larger colleges. As for the 
course on the evolution of the modern novel, I am 
inclined to doubt if I had any predecessor or even 
for several years any competitor. And the third 
course, that on English versification, might have 
been described as " metrical composition," since it 



394 THESE MANY YEARS 

was designed to parallel the prescribed courses in 
the theory and practice of rhetoric, my intention 
being to tempt the students into various kinds of 
verse-making, not with any absurd hope of develop- 
ing them into poets, but mainly because I believed 
metrical composition to be an excellent discipline 
for prose-writing. This was also a novelty; and 
even now it is not as frequent as it might be. Here 
also I may note that in my second year at Columbia, 
that is in the fall of 1892, 1 announced a fourth course 
on the dramatists of the nineteenth century, a topic 
not at that time treated in any other college. Of 
course, no one of these courses was deliberately 
given because of its novelty. They were all four 
announced solely because their subjects were those 
with which I had made myself most familiar. In 
my diffidence on the threshold of a new career I 
wanted to advance as easily as might be along the 
line of least resistance. In so far as I may have 
been a pioneer into little-explored regions, my pio- 
neering was wholly without malice prepense. 

Recalling the dull drudgery in my own under- 
graduate days over the lamentable manual from the 
dry pages of which we were supposed to derive the 
dead facts of English literature, I eschewed the use 
of any text-book, requiring my classes to read for 
themselves and encouraging them to form their own 
opinions about the books they read. Quite possi- 
bly I began by demanding of them more pages than 
they could very well digest; but at all events I was 
acting in accordance with the sound principle that, 
if they were exposed to the contagion of literature, 



DRAMATIC LITERATURE . 395 

some of them might catch it. And I hoped that my 
own lively appreciation of the writings of most of 
the authors I asked them to read might awaken in 
at least some of them a kindred enjoyment. I had 
written novels and plays myself, and if I was no poet 
I was none the less responsible for a good deal of 
rime, whatever its value; and so I had no hesitation 
in taking them into the workshop and in talking to 
them about technic. And however little beneficial 
my instruction may have been to my students, it 
was highly profitable to me, for in teaching them I 
soon discovered that I was perpetually learning 
myself. I was constantly spurred to the acquisition 
of wider information by the necessity of meeting the 
eager inquiries of intelligent youth. 



II 

I went back to Columbia exactly twenty years 
after I had been graduated with the class of '71; 
and the college I found on my return was very dif- 
ferent from the college I had left. There was a new 
spirit in the air; the many changes which had taken 
place during the score of years while I had been ab- 
sent were so surprising as to be almost startling. 
I had left Columbia when it was still a lazy little 
college, almost asleep, and almost devoid of any 
ambition to make itself worthy of the great city in 
which it was placed. I found it awake and active 
and ambitious and acutely alive to its future possi- 
bilities. The seed planted by President Barnard 



396 THESE MANY YEARS 

had at last begun to fructify; the sound doctrine 
he had preached to unheeding ears year after year 
in his reports (which are now accepted as educa- 
tional classics) had won wider recognition; and a 
few of the plans he had proposed were on the point 
of being carried out. 

When I had been a student the college was suffi- 
cient unto itself; the scientific school was establish- 
ing its right to exist; the law school, semi-proprietary 
as it was, housed itself unworthily at a distance of two 
miles; and the medical school, the College of Physi- 
cians and Surgeons, wholly proprietary, had only a 
nominal connection with Columbia. When I began 
to lecture I found that the scientific school had come 
into its own; that the law school was sumptuously 
sheltered in a beautiful building in the college 
grounds; that a movement was already under way 
to incorporate the medical school more intimately 
with Columbia; and that there was a graduate 
school of political science with a gifted group of 
enthusiastic professors picked by the unerring dis- 
cretion of its dean, John W. Burgess, in whose 
prophetic eye there was the vision of a Columbia 
proportionate to the opportunities and the responsi- 
bilities due to her position in the metropolis. There 
was even a graduate school already in existence for 
guiding advanced students in literature, in linguis- 
tics, and in philosophy ; and the young dean of this 
school of philosophy, Nicholas Murray Butler, was 
a sturdy supporter of the advances advocated by 
Barnard. 

At the center of all these activities and expansions, 



DRAMATIC LITERATURE 397 

and serving as the foundation of them all, was the 
historic college with its four-year course, already far 
more flexible and far richer in its offerings than it 
had been in my time. Perhaps it was in the college 
itself that the signs of new life were most abundant 
and most obvious; and yet the relations of the old 
college to the auxiliary institutions it had mothered 
were insecure and anomalous. The legal name of 
this clutter of schools was still Columbia College, 
yet all the essential elements of a real university 
were at hand; and I had not long been connected 
with the institution before it asserted itself and 
assumed the style and title of Columbia University, 
restoring to the earlier entity out of which it had 
developed by force of circumstances and in the 
course of time, the historic title of Columbia College. 
I came on the scene in time to behold the actual 
creation of the university and to see it " pawing the 
earth, its hinder parts to free." 

The Columbia I had known in my youth had a 
faculty of less than ten, nearly all of whom I recalled 
as well advanced in years. The Columbia which I 
joined had a faculty of two or three hundred, the 
most of whom were still young, with the best of their 
work before them. In the Columbia I dimly re- 
membered we spoke with awe of Drisler's contri- 
butions to the Greek lexicon of Liddell and Scott, 
revering this as the sole outward and visible sign of 
authorship connected with the college. In the Co- 
lumbia to which I returned there was an incessant 
productivity; and a dozen at least of my colleagues 
were members of the Authors Club. It was a highly 



398 THESE MANY YEARS 

stimulating society into which 1 was welcomed; 
and its atmosphere was electric. 

The movement in advance had been in progress 
for several years before I arrived to take part in it; 
and already the activities of the rejuvenated insti- 
tution were so many and so energetic that they were 
cramped for space in the indecorous old buildings 
which made a sorry appearance by the side of the 
stately and towering edifice which housed the li- 
brary and the law school, and the more recently 
erected Hamilton Hall wherein Professor Price had 
the study I was privileged to occupy in his absence. 
If Columbia should be forced to remain where it 
was, confined to a single small city block, beside 
which ran the shrieking and hissing locomotives of 
a triple railroad, its future would be strangled. And 
in the winter of my return the far-seeing clerk of 
the Board of Trustees, John B. Pine, urged the dar- 
ing move to Morningside Heights, a move soon 
resolved upon and finally accomplished six years 
later, in 1897, when Columbia took possession of its 
artistically planned new buildings on the spacious 
grounds of the Bloomingdale Asylum, as it had 
taken over in 1859 the old buildings of the Asylum 
for the Deaf and Dumb. An autobiography like 
this must not be permitted to become a history of 
Columbia University, however tempting the oppor- 
tunity may appear; but it is only fit that the auto- 
biographer should set down here his own delight in 
having been an eye-witness of the logical and irre- 
sistible expansion of the educational institution with 
which the last years of his life have been so closely 



DRAMATIC LITERATURE 399 

connected. His own share in this outflowering 
from an ancient root has been minimal; but he has 
always rejoiced at being allowed to behold a spec- 
tacle so nobly encouraging and so typically American 
as the sudden transformation of an old and weak 
college into a new and strong university, aspiring 
in spirit as well as ample in numbers. 

Ill 

In 1891 the large college clubs which now flourish 
in New York had not been founded; and the alumni 
associations of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Co- 
lumbia held annual dinners in the fall and early 
winter at each of which representatives of the 
other three societies were invited to speak. The 
Columbia dinner took place in the middle of De- 
cember, and I was asked to "improve the occasion" 
with a few remarks. As I was allowed to choose 
my topic I selected 'Twenty Years' Changes at Co- 
lumbia,' and for once in my life I reaped the bounti- 
ful reward of the spellbinder. What I had to de- 
scribe to my fellow-alumni was news to most of 
those present and it was interesting to all of them; 
and thus it happened that the bearer of glad tidings 
received the guerdon of applause as if he himself 
had brought about the happy state of affairs he was 
merely reporting upon. 

This is a phenomenon often to be observed at 
public dinners; and I came to the conclusion later 
that a speech cannot fail to be fairly successful if 
only it contains what the speaker himself wants to 



400 THESE MANY YEARS 

say to that special audience, and if this is what that 
audience wants to hear from him. If there is not 
this community of desire, the speaker may enjoy 
his own orating but the listeners are likely to be 
wearied by words having no special appeal to them; 
the prosperity of a speech lies in the ears of them 
that hear it. It would have been well for me in 
1891 if I had firmly grasped this fundamental prin- 
ciple then and if I had been guided by it. Be- 
cause my remarks had been listened to with more or 
less interest at the dinner of the Columbia Alumni, 
I was requested to go to the dinner of the Harvard 
Alumni, as the representative of Columbia. I went 
with a light heart and I came home with my vanity 
trailed in the dust. To the Columbia men I had 
something to say, a message to deliver, a report to 
make, something that I really wanted to utter to 
them and that they were glad to hear from me. At 
the Harvard dinner I had nothing to say altho I 
had to rise and say something. I had no message 
and no report welcome to Harvard ears; and these 
ears listened to me only out of politeness. My glib 
utterances fell into a frosty void; they echoed in my 
own ears like the hollow crackling of thorns under a 
pot; and to intensify the misfortune of the mis- 
adventure into which my thoughtlessness had led me, 
I spoke sandwiched between Phillips Brooks and the 
modest captain of the triumphant football-team. 

I had already agreed to go later also to the Yale 
dinner, but I had taken the warning to heart; and 
for years now I have refused to stand and deliver, 
unless I at least believe that I have something to 



DRAMATIC LITERATURE 401 

say that the special gathering I am asked to address 
will be willing to hear. Now and again I have fool- 
ishly yielded to friendly pressure and to the insidi- 
ous plea: "You can say something — you can say 
anything you want to say." And when I have ac- 
cepted these invitations and found too late that 
there was nothing I really wanted to say, I have 
observed that however courteously the listeners 
may have endeavored to disguise their lack of in- 
terest in what I managed to utter, their endeavors 
were no more successful than my speech. 

It may be noted, however, that these comments 
on the conditions of profitable offhand speaking, 
and on proffering a few remarks after dinner, must 
not be supposed to apply to more formal and stately 
occasions, a commemorative oration or an address 
before the Phi Beta Kappa. To such more dignified 
meetings the audience comes in an altogether dif- 
ferent frame of mind and with an altogether different 
expectation; and the speaker is then encouraged 
to do his best, to be grave and serious, to voice 
afresh the perennial platitudes and to clothe anew 
the everlasting commonplaces, if only he himself 
firmly believes that he is reflecting new light on the 
eternal verities. 

In the course of my quarter century in the service 
of Columbia I have been drafted once to give a Phi 
Beta Kappa address and again once to give a some- 
what similar address at the opening of the institu- 
tion in the fall. For executive and for administra- 
tive positions I developed no aptitude; and for 
committee work I had no liking. As a mere matter 



402 THESE MANY YEARS 

of record I may set down here that I have been a 
trustee of the Columbia University Press since its 
foundation in 1893, that I served as editor of the 
Columbia University Quarterly for a year, and that 
I was the chairman of a committee to bring out a 
history of the university published when Columbia 
celebrated the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of 
the founding of King's College. When Bunner died 
in 1896, others of his friends joined with me in raising 
a memorial fund sufficient to provide a gold medal 
to be awarded annually to the candidate for a 
Columbia degree who should submit the best essay 
on an assigned topic in the history of American 
literature; and I am inclined to believe that the H. C. 
Bunner Medal was the earliest reward offered in any 
of our colleges for research in the American branch 
of English literature. 

In 1899, when my title was changed to professor 
of dramatic literature, a department of English was 
created with Price as its chairman and with the late 
George Rice Carpenter as its secretary. As the 
university has grown with the expansion of its 
three colleges, Columbia, Barnard, and Teachers, 
with the development of graduate work in the school 
of philosophy, and with the establishment of the 
School of Journalism, new professors have been added 
to the department of English until there are now 
more than a score of us — twice as many in this 
single department as there were in the whole college 
when I was an undergraduate. After the death of 
Price, the first chairman, the office was abolished 
and the department has had no official head, exhibit- 



DRAMATIC LITERATURE 403 

ing itself as an example of pure democracy, doing 
all its business in town-meeting. Acting as a unit, 
we have suggested all appointments and all promo- 
tions, and the president and the trustees have 
favored this autonomy in so far as the resources of 
the budget would permit. It is evidence of the 
cordiality of our relations with one another and 
of our harmonious opinions, that no action has been 
taken since the foundation of the department of 
English, except on the unanimous vote of all present. 
Nor does this external concord conceal any factional 
jealousy; as a matter of fact, the several members 
of the department are on the best of terms with one 
another and are constantly seeking out occasions of 
service to one another, as I can testify on repeated 
personal experience of this good-will. 



IV 

Altho I did not for several years after I was called 
to Columbia relinquish the writing of stories, long 
and short, or the writing of plays, the natural result 
of my professional duties was to detach me more 
or less from creative work and to center my attention 
more and more on criticism. The necessity of nar- 
rating the lives of authors and of relating their 
successive publications to their biographies drew 
me irresistibly toward literary history — which is 
not a brother to criticism but only a first cousin. 
I was led to consider the evolution of the American 
branch of English literature, and to see in it the most 



404 THESE MANY YEARS 

salient and the most significant record of the chang- 
ing temper and the modifying moods of the American 
people. 

After I had given my elementary course on Ameri- 
can literature for three or four years I contributed 
to St. Nicholas a series of papers on the chief 
American authors, focussing the attention of the 
young reader on the men themselves with the firm 
hope that he might thereby be lured into the reading 
of their works for his own enjoyment. To these 
papers, published in a juvenile magazine, I added 
a few others, and thus I was enabled to send forth 
in 1896 an 'Introduction to the Study of American 
Literature.' I hoped to have this adopted as a text- 
book in high schools but I desired to avoid the 
aridity of the manual of English literature that I still 
recalled with detestation from my undergraduate 
days, and I therefore sought to give a human interest 
to the schoolbook by adorning it with portraits of 
the authors, views of their well-known dwellings, and 
reproductions of their autographs and manuscripts. 
My indurated modesty forces me to ascribe to these 
devices, which were then novel, the continued popu- 
larity of the little book. It has attained to a cir- 
culation which many a best seller might envy, 
since its sale was a quarter of a million copies within 
twenty-five years after it appeared. 

This primer, for such the 'Introduction to the 
Study of American Literature' was intended to be, 
was the first book which was the immediate con- 
sequence of my teaching; but it was not to be the 
last. It had grown out of my conduct of courses 



DRAMATIC LITERATURE 405 

for undergraduates ; and my time was divided equally 
between them and the graduate students who flocked 
to Columbia in steadily increasing numbers. I was 
asked to give a graduate course on the development 
of the drama from ^Eschylus to the Middle Ages to 
parallel a course by another professor on the evolu- 
tion of criticism from Aristotle to the Italian Renas- 
cence; and this compelled me gladly to return to 
the Greek texts over which I had toiled in the 
persistent search for the second aorist. To my 
delighted surprise, I discovered on this more mature 
investigation that the authors of 'Agamemnon' 
and 'GEdipus' and 'Medea' were playwrights as 
well as poets, and that the author of the * Frogs ' was 
a precursor of Weber and Fields in addition to being 
the lyrist best beloved of all the Greeks by Arthur 
Pendennis. 

I had totally forgotten my very early ambition 
to write a history of dramatic literature long before 
I set to work to prepare ten lectures covering the 
whole 'Development of the Drama.' Seven of these 
lectures I delivered before the Brooklyn Institute of 
Arts and Sciences in the winter of 1902; and in the 
spring of that year I went over to London to repeat 
three of them at the Royal Institution in Albemarle 
Street. The whole series appeared as a book in 
1903; and ten years later I was greatly gratified 
to receive a Japanese translation, made by a native 
of Nippon who had been a graduate student in one 
of my classes. 

The opening lecture in this volume was devoted 
to a discussion of the principles of dramaturgic crafts- 



406 THESE MANY YEARS 

manship, all of which, so I had decided to my own 
satisfaction, could be deduced from the fact that 
every dramatic poet has devised his plays with the 
desire and intent that they should be performed 
in a theater, by actors, and before an audience — 
the playhouse of his own time, the players of his own 
country, and the playgoers of his own race being the 
three factors which necessarily condition his work. 
A few years after this chapter had appeared in the 
'Development of the Drama,' I was invited to pre- 
pare a volume in which my body of doctrine on 
dramaturgy should be declared in more detail; and 
in response to this invitation I published in 1910 
a 'Study of the Drama' in which I set in serried 
array the principles I had been expounding at Co- 
lumbia ever since I had become its professor of 
dramatic literature. 

In 1911 I followed this 'Study of the Drama' 
with a 'Study of Versification,' which contained the 
body of doctrine on practical metrics which I had 
developed during the years when I was giving the 
course on English versification to successive classes 
of undergraduates. My course on the modern 
drama I could not decant in a volume by itself, as 
the course had been given for the first time at least 
ten years after I had published my consideration of 
the leading 'French Dramatists of the Nineteenth 
Century.' But I had never let out of my mind the 
ambition to deal in my own fashion with the career 
and with the achievements of the master of French 
comedy; and after I had profited by discussing his 
successive plays with successive classes of keen- 



DRAMATIC LITERATURE 407 

minded and well-equipped graduate students — a 
discussion which I recognize as an invaluable gym- 
nastic — I set to work at last to tell again the story 
of Moliere's harassed life and to study anew the 
specific merits of his several plays. When the 
biography was completed, I extracted from it or 
condensed from it six lectures which I delivered in 
Boston before the Lowell Institute in the fall of 1908; 
and two years later I published 'Moliere; His Life and 
His Works,' a biography which had this novelty at 
least, that it dealt with the dramatist primarily as 
a playwright and only secondarily as a man of 
letters. Then I began work at once on a correspond- 
ing consideration of 'Shakspere as a Playwright,' 
which was published in the fall of 1913, and in which 
I expressly refused to dwell upon his poetry, his 
philosophy, and his psychology, preferring rather to 
deal with him as a playmaker pure and simple, an 
aspect of his genius often neglected by those of his 
ardent admirers who have little knowledge of stage- 
craft. 

Nor are these the only books due in large part to 
my professorship at Columbia. A volume entitled 
'Parts of Speech: Essays on English,' issued in 
1901, may be considered as a continuation of the 
linguistic investigations begun in the 'American- 
isms and Briticisms' of nine years earlier. Other 
collections of essays, however, which appeared at 
irregular intervals after I was called to Columbia — 
'Aspects of Fiction' (1896), the 'Historical Novel' 
(1901), 'Inquiries and Opinions' (1907), and 'Gate- 
ways to Literature' (1912) — reveal in their pages 



408 THESE MANY YEARS 

the influence of my attempt to make the history 
of literature alive by an incessant consideration of 
its ever-advancing technic. 



"From forty to fifty a man must move upward 
or the natural falling off in the vigor of life will carry 
him downward." This remark of Holmes's seems 
to be shrewder and more solidly rooted in fact 
than the severer assertion of Dr. Osier, that a man 
has necessarily done his best work before he reaches 
twoscore. I count it great good fortune that when 
I was forty I found myself practising a new pro- 
fession, which forced me into unexpected activities, 
thus counteracting the natural falling off in the 
vigor of life. 

It must be noted that Holmes also declared the 
professor's chair to be "an insulating stool, so to 
speak; his age, his knowledge, real or supposed, his 
official station, are like the glass legs which support 
the electrician's piece of furniture and cut it off 
from the common currents of the floor upon which 
it stands." This may be true enough in a medical 
or technical school or even in a small rural college; 
but it is less true in a huge urban university, with 
its stimulating mass of graduate students with whom 
a professor is brought into an intimate contact 
rarely possible when he is imparting instruction 
solely to undergraduates of immature years. There 
is no keener intellectual exercise, none which calls 
for all the mental celerity that a man may possess, 



DRAMATIC LITERATURE 409 

than the conducting of a class of well-equipped 
graduate students, often men who have been out of 
college for several years, engaged themselves in 
teaching. To hold their interest, to win their re- 
spect, to force them to do their own thinking, the 
professor has to put forth all his energy. He can- 
not afford to let these alert investigators, eager and 
ardent to acquire, catch him unawares. He cannot 
override them by his age, his official station, his 
knowledge, real or supposed. He cannot but be 
aware that they are forever "sizing him up," as the 
phrase is; and he must do his best to "make good," 
as they put it in their direct vernacular. 

He has to guide their inquiries into the subject- 
matter of the course and to train them to push their 
investigations further after they have left him. 
And, above all, is it his bounden duty to force them 
to form their own judgments upon the works they 
are called upon to analyze. The highest compli- 
ment I ever received from a graduate student, and 
therefore the most grateful to my ears, was the 
remark that I had made it clear to him that it was 
not only his right to have his own opinion about the 
successive masterpieces we had been discussing in 
class, but also his duty to come to a conclusion of 
his own. What the professor needs to bear in mind 
always is that it is for him to give his students a 
grasp on the principles of criticism so firm that they 
can be trusted to form sound conclusions of their 
own. 

Not only have I profited incessantly by close con- 
tact with alert graduate students, gathered in a little 



410 THESE MANY YEARS 

group about my table and doing their share, each of 
them, in the discussions we were constantly starting, 
but I have also found keen stimulus in my associa- 
tion with my fellow-professors. In the quarter of 
a century in which I have been connected with 
Columbia, the university has kept on expanding 
and branching out into new fields. The student 
body has gone on increasing year after year; and 
this has compelled a corresponding increase in the 
teaching staff. The professors giving instruction in 
Columbia College when I was graduated in 1871 
were less than ten in number; and when I returned 
in 1891 to join them, I discovered that I was to have 
two or three hundred colleagues. After twenty- 
six years of teaching I find that the number of 
officers of instruction has swollen to about eight 
hundred. Even when I joined them, most of these 
new colleagues were younger than I; and as I have 
grown older with the passing of the years, I have had 
the privilege of association with a steadily increas- 
ing group of men, interested in the things I have at 
heart, earnest and ambitious, and representing a 
generation later than mine and intermediary be- 
tween my own maturity and the immaturity of the 
undergraduates of the college. This contact with 
those who still had the best years of their lives 
before them, has been steadily stimulating for a 
senior in the craft, and wholesome in that it tended 
to prevent an elder from premature stiffening and 
hardening of the mental muscles. 

In my persistent playgoing it has amazed me to 
note that there seems to have been evolved in our 



DRAMATIC LITERATURE 411 

theater a definite type of stage-professor, as sum- 
mary and as regardless of the fact as the stage- 
Irishman or the stage-Frenchman. This traditional 
figure represents a foolish and unworldly person, 
quite unable to take care of himself, and brought 
forward as a butt for unsympathetic laughter. 
Whenever I have joined in the mirth, I did it with 
my withers unwrung and wondering where the 
hasty playwright had ever seen any one remotely 
resembling the character he had projected on the 
boards. Possibly a few of the more obvious traits 
of the stage-professor may have been borrowed from 
some occupant of a chair in a very rural college; 
but I doubt it. The stage-professor seems to me to 
be of imagination all compact. Certainly I have 
never discovered among my Columbia colleagues 
any one who had any of the characteristics which 
combine to make the theatrical type a figure of fun. 
Indeed, I incline to the belief that we have de- 
veloped at Columbia a professor of a kind not likely 
to exist except in a university which happens to 
be incorporated in a great city. In little and remote 
country colleges the teaching staff may possibly 
share a little in the rusticity of their neighbors; and 
in like manner the professors in a large city univer- 
sity are likely to acquire a sort of urbanity by con- 
tagion from those who surround them and with 
whom they are likely to have many points of con- 
tact. At Columbia the professor is not uncommon 
who is both urban and urbane, who is not only a 
gentleman and a scholar, in the good old phrase, 
but also more or less a man of the world and even 



412 THESE MANY YEARS 

on occasion a man of affairs. There is one whose 
skill in finance is so well known that he was prof- 
fered the presidency of a trust company at a salary 
several times that which he was receiving, in spite of 
which he declined the tempting proposal. 

There is another who made a most important 
invention by which he is in receipt of a superb 
income. There are at least half-a-dozen more who 
have inherited comfortable fortunes and who have 
none the less preferred the professor's chair to a 
seat on the box of a four-in-hand. And in my 
own department, that of English and Comparative 
Literature, there are four or five who serve as 
literary advisers to as many different publishing 
houses, thus evidencing their possession of a fair 
share of practicality. 

So far as I have been able to form an opinion, there 
is no university in the United States where the posi- 
tion of the professor is pleasanter than it is at Co- 
lumbia. The students, graduate and undergraduate, 
are satisfactory in quality; and their spirit is excel- 
lent. The teaching staff is so large that it is gen- 
erally possible for each of us to cover that part of 
his field in which he is most keenly interested. Our 
relations with each other and with the several deans 
and the president and the trustees are ever friendly. 
So long as we do our work faithfully we are left alone 
to do it in our own fashion. And we have all of us 
the Lernfreiheit and the Lehrfreiheit, the liberty 
of the soul and of the mind, which was once the 
boast of the German universities, but which has been 
lost of late under the rigidity of Prussian autocracy. 



DRAMATIC LITERATURE 413 

It seems to me that a man is happily situated in 
life if he finds himself set to do the work that he 
likes best, if he can do this work to the satisfaction 
of his associates, and if he is in receipt of a living 
wage, sufficient for the needs of his family. It is a 
notorious fact that the teacher is lamentably under- 
paid, in our schools, in our colleges, and in our uni- 
versities; but it is a fact also that this condition is 
now recognized and that it is therefore likely to be 
remedied sooner or later. 



CHAPTER XVIII 
LATER EUROPEAN MEMORIES 



AS it has seemed convenient to compress into a 
A\ single chapter a summary account of my 
connection with Columbia University, so 
it is also advisable for me now to group together 
my scattered recollections of successive summer 
trips to Europe. In 1883, Lowell was still our 
official representative in London, doing his utmost 
always to better the public and the private relations 
of the United States with the British Empire, and 
never willing to allow anything to be said in his 
presence that might seem to reflect on his own 
country. He was accused more than once of being 
a little too friendly with the British; yet some of 
his many British friends thought that he was unduly 
sensitive, not to call it touchy, in his alertness to 
detect any covert comparison which might strike 
him as disparaging to America. Colonel Eustace 
Balfour, of the London Scottish (who was a son-in- 
law of the Duke of Argyle) , once confided to me that 
when Lowell was a guest at Inverary, the house- 
party found it expedient to avoid discussion of 
American topics for fear of arousing the jealous 
susceptibility of the American minister. 

414 



LATER EUROPEAN MEMORIES 415 

There was no doubt of the cordiality of Lowell's 
reception by all classes of society in the British Isles. 
The author of * Jonathan to John' was made to feel 
at home; and he bore himself with equal cordiality 
and dignity. Indeed, dignity was his unfailing 
characteristic; and I recall the shock it was to Lau- 
rence Hutton, going one day with Henry James 
to pay a visit to Lowell, and rinding there Chris- 
topher Pearse Cranch, who had dropped in to see his 
old friend and who called him "Jim." It was dur- 
ing this interview that Hutton told Lowell of a 
recent visit to Cambridge, where he had called on 
Mrs. Ole Bull, the tenant of Elmwood while its 
owner was away; and Lowell asked wistfully: 
"Do the trees miss me?" 

I met Lowell first at an afternoon reception at 
Lang's in June, 1883; and I made bold to ask him 
how he was getting on with the biography of Haw- 
thorne which he had undertaken for the American 
Men of Letters series. He told me that he had not 
yet had time to settle down to it, altho he was glad 
that he had undertaken it. He added that he had 
one special qualification for the task in that he 
was a New Englander, since Hawthorne could be 
fully comprehended only by a man of his own 
section. I mentioned Henry James's volume on 
Hawthorne in the English Men of Letters series, and 
Lowell smilingly declared that to be a very inter- 
esting book — "but Henry James, in so far as he is 
an American at all, is only a New Yorker; he is 
certainly not a New Englander." 

Lowell was a handsome man, a fact of which he 



416 THESE MANY YEARS 

could not be unaware; and at this first meeting I 
was struck by a certain fleeting resemblance to E. L. 
Godkin. In my juvenile indiscretion I ventured 
tactlessly to suggest this to him. "Ah," said Lowell, 
smiling humorously, "but that is the sort of thing 
you must never say. It won't do to tell any man that 
he resembles any other man; he may not care for 
the other man's looks !" 

Those were the years when Walter Besant was 
engaged in establishing the Incorporated Society of 
Authors, of which Tennyson had accepted the presi- 
dency ; and they were also the years when the Amer- 
ican Copyright League, composed of our own writers 
with Lowell as its president, was working incessantly 
for a law to secure more adequate protection in the 
United States for foreign men of letters and for 
American men of letters in foreign countries. Late 
in July, 1888, the Incorporated Society of Authors 
gave a dinner to Lowell and to the other American 
authors who happened to be in London that summer, 
in recognition of our efforts in behalf of international 
copyright. James Bryce, who was about to publish 
his epoch-making book on the 'American Common- 
wealth,' was the chairman. Lowell made one of 
his most felicitous speeches, altho he began by con- 
fessing that he no longer went to a dinner with a 
light heart, thinking over his opening remarks in the 
cab and relying on the spur of the moment for the 
rest of his address. He discussed the vexed ques- 
tion of international copyright as one of the many 
difficulties which had arisen between Great Britain 
and the United States. He admitted that there 



LATER EUROPEAN MEMORIES 417 

might be difficulties which were serious, altho there 
were not likely to be any "which good sense and good 
feeling cannot settle." Then, with an irresistible 
smile, he went on: "I think I have been told often 
enough to remember that my countrymen are apt 
to think that they are in the right, that they are 
always in the right, and that they are likely to look 
only at their own side of any question. Now, this 
attitude conduces certainly to peace of mind and 
imperturbability of judgment, whatever other merits 
it may have. I am sure I do not know where we 
got it. Do you?" And an immediate roar of 
laughter proved that his point had gone home. 

Besant had asked me as one of the American guests 
to rise after Lowell sat down and to propose the 
health of our British hosts; and I managed to say 
what had to be said as concisely as possible. But 
when I got on my feet I recognized as never before 
the validity of the assertion that the eyes of men 

After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, 
Are idly bent on him that enters next, 
Thinking his prattle tedious. 

It happened, when the dinner-party broke up and 
we were regaining possession of our hats, that I 
found myself next to Lowell and I could not resist 
telling him how delightful I had found his speech. 
"But I am getting old," he answered; "my memory 
is no longer what it used to be. To-night I left out 
half my good things." And this confession con- 
firmed me in my conviction that even a speaker as 



418 THESE MANY YEARS 

richly endowed as Lowell and as apparently spon- 
taneous could not forego the labor of proper prep- 
aration. 



II 

Altho we ran over to the Continent for brief visits 
to Paris, we generally spent the most of our European 
summers in London; and I was in the habit of lunch- 
ing at the Savile several times a week. On Saturdays 
I was likely to find Walter Besant, always a most 
agreeable companion, kindly, genial, and possessed 
of both humor and good humor. He was then 
living at Hampstead, and the rear of his garden 
jutted out into Hampstead Heath. Once when he 
was tending his flowers he overheard a fragment of 
the conversation of two cockneys, passing along 
the other side of his wall. "Wot did you do then?" 
asked one voice, and promptly another voice an- 
swered: "Wot did I do? I told 'im I'd punch 'is 
bloody 'ead if 'e didn't stop 'is inter-bloody-fering !" 
On repeating this to one of my Grecian colleagues 
at Columbia I was told that this daring device for 
achieving rhetorical emphasis was sometimes em- 
ployed by the Greeks and that the grammarians had 
even invented a name for it — tmesis. 

At luncheon one day late in the eighties I happened 
to tell Besant how I had noticed in my successive 
visits to the Savile that I found a gap in the circle of 
my friends there every time I came back. The first 
year it was Professor E. H. Palmer whom I missed, 
and the second year it was Professor Fleeming Jen- 



LATER EUROPEAN MEMORIES 419 

kin; the third it was A. J. Duffield, the translator 
of Cervantes, and the fourth it was Cotter Morison, 
the biographer of Gibbon. When I arrived at the 
Savile several years after this I heard that Besant 
had been dangerously ill; and when he turned up at 
luncheon a Saturday or two later he told me that 
he had awakened suddenly one night when his 
condition was most threatening with the thought: 
"Am I the next man that Brander Matthews is 
going to miss when he comes over?" 

I recall an earlier afternoon when Besant and 
Cotter Morison and I chatted cheerfully over our 
coffee in the smoking-room of the club. When Mor- 
ison left us at last, Besant asked me if I had noticed 
any difference in the manner of the friend who had 
just gone. I replied that I had not; and then he 
told me that Morison had been making ready for 
years to write a history of France; he was about to 
begin on it when he was unexpectedly conscious of 
strange symptoms, so he had gone that morning to 
an eminent physician, who bad examined him very 
carefully — only to tell him finally that he had a 
fatal disease and that his days were numbered. 
Morison had come straight to the Savile and he 
had found occasion to inform Besant that he would 
never be able to accomplish what had been the ob- 
ject of his life. Then he had changed the subject 
as I joined them and he had talked to us both as 
tho he were not under sentence of death. Not long 
after I had returned to America in the fall, I saw in 
the papers that the doctor's prediction had come 
true. 



420 THESE MANY YEARS 

Among the other men whom I met at the Savile 
was Arnold-Forster, a nephew of the blind states- 
man, Forster, who had stood our friend during the 
civil war. Arnold-Forster was a specialist in mili- 
tary affairs, who kept himself abreast of the lat- 
est discoveries in science and was always glad to 
supply information about them. It is the custom 
of the Savile that any one attending the ordinary 
served every evening at two long tables in the 
dining-room shall feel at liberty to converse freely 
with his neighbors without waiting for any formal 
introduction. One evening a friend of mine noticed 
that Arnold-Forster was holding forth to the man 
sitting next to him; and when they all went up- 
stairs for their coffee, my friend said to him that he 
had observed the animation of his conversation. 
"Yes," the insistent disseminator of information 
explained, "that was a very intelligent man next to 
me; and he seemed to be very much interested. " 

"What were you talking about?" was the query. 

"Oh, I was just explaining some of the latest dis- 
coveries in astrophysics." 

My friend smiled and said: "I should think that 
he might be interested in that. Don't you know who 
he is ? — Sir Robert Ball, the astronomer royal for 
Ireland." 

For a moment the imperturbability of Arnold- 
Forster was shattered. Then he laughed in his 
turn and said: "Isn't that just like me?" 

Another of my Savile friends was Charles Villiers 
Stanford, the composer; and we collaborated on a 
ballet for which I devised a libretto and for which 



LATER EUROPEAN MEMORIES 421 

he was to write the music. The project was cap- 
tivating; yet now after an interval of more than a 
score of years I fear that it is likely to remain a 
project only. I prepared the book and Stanford 
made ready the themes he intended to employ in 
the score; but the playwright and the musician are 
dependent on the ballet-master, who has to elabo- 
rate the pantomimic suggestions of the librettist and 
to indicate to the composer how many bars must 
be allotted to every successive episode. Neither 
at the Alhambra nor at the Empire, the homes of 
ballet in London, was Stanford able to persuade the 
chorographic authorities to agree to produce our 
joint work. I confess that this has been a disappoint- 
ment, since I thought there would be a certain 
piquancy in the announcement of a ballet at either 
the Empire or the Alhambra (the least scholastic 
of establishments in their atmosphere), having its 
book written by the professor of literature at Co- 
lumbia University and its score composed by the 
professor of music at Cambridge University. 

One of my talks with Stanford had a more for- 
tunate outcome for him. He told me that he had 
once planned a comic opera for which his fellow- 
Irishman, W. G. Wills (the author of the 'Charles 
the First' wherein Irving was so dignified and so 
pathetic), was to prepare the book, basing it on 
Sheridan Lefanu's dramatic ballad, 'Shamus O'Brien.' 
They had abandoned their scheme when Gilbert and 
Sullivan brought out 'Trial by Jury,' because they 
did not dare to follow that with a musical play in 
which a court scene would have to be taken very 



422 THESE MANY YEARS 

seriously. I suggested that this difficulty could 
have been removed by making the trial in 'Shamus 
O'Brien' a drumhead court-martial. 

"We didn't happen to think of that," Stanford 
said. "And now it is too late. Wills is dead." 

Then I told him that I knew another Irish play- 
wright, far more apt for a work of this kind than 
Wills, since he had a gift for writing sparkling lyrics; 
and as I was about to return at once to New York, 
I gave Stanford a letter of introduction to George 
H. Jessop and I wrote to Jessop to prepare him for 
a line from Stanford. Before I got out of sight of 
land the composer and the playwright had found 
one another and had started to work on the comic 
opera. At their second meeting Stanford told Jes- 
sop that it was very odd it had needed an American 
to make them acquainted — since his mother had 
been Jessop's mother's bridesmaid ! It is gratifying 
to me to be able to record that when the result of 
this collaboration of the two Irishmen I had been 
instrumental in bringing together was produced at 
the Opera-Comique in London, in 1896, it met with 
instant success. 



Ill 

It is the privilege of a professor at Columbia to 
have a sabbatical vacation every seventh year; he 
can take a whole year off on half -pay or he can have 
a half-year on full pay. In February, 1900, I took 
advantage of this permission to pay a visit to Egypt 
and to Greece. What most impressed me on my 



LATER EUROPEAN MEMORIES 423 

trip up the Nile was the discovery that the dwellers 
in its valley are very much the same to-day that they 
were thousands of years ago. The faces and the 
figures of the men who passed us in their little skiffs 
and whom we saw at work on the banks were iden- 
tical with the faces and the figures of the peasants 
depicted in the wall-paintings in the tombs of the 
Kings, preserved unimpaired in color thru twoscore 
centuries. And in all those endless years the native 
Egyptians had never ruled themselves. When I 
saw them they were governed by the British, who 
had succeeded the Turks and who had had as usurp- 
ing predecessors the French, the Arabs, the Romans, 
the Greeks, and the Persians. I was familiar with 
Brunetiere's assertion that the essence of the drama is 
a struggle, that it must display the clash of contend- 
ing desires, and that it flourishes most abundantly 
in the strong-willed peoples — more especially at the 
epochs when the national volition has been stiff- 
ened. So I felt that if this theory was sound, then 
a weak-willed race like the Egyptians were unlikely 
ever to have developed a drama of their own. My 
careful search in the museums confirmed me in this 
belief, for amid all the relics of the past which supply 
endless information about the Egyptians of old, I 
could find nothing which seemed to imply the exist- 
ence of a drama in Egypt even in its most primi- 
tive form. 

From Egypt we went to Constantinople and then 
to Athens, where I had the pleasure of placing my- 
self in the seat reserved for his priest in the Theater 
of Dionysus. From Athens we took the railroad 



424 THESE MANY YEARS 

to Patras; we skirted the bay of Salamis, we crossed 
high above the Corinth canal, and then we ran along 
all day by the edge of the gulf of Corinth. We 
were in a comfortable corridor-train; and in our 
compartment there was a gentleman of a somewhat 
swarthy complexion, whom I took to be a Parsee. 
It turned out that I was right in my guess, and in 
the course of the day we fell into talk. He was 
from Bombay. He spoke excellent English, and 
he was evidently a man of education. He told us 
that he had been down the day before to have a 
good look at the bay of Salamis. "I wanted to see 
the place where my ancestors were defeated by the 
Greeks," he explained. "Herodotus says that there 
were three millions of us — but then Herodotus was 
such a liar." 

From Patras we crossed to Brindisi, and over to 
Naples and on to Rome and to Florence. We 
went out one afternoon to Fiesole, where I wanted to 
see the well-preserved ruin of a Roman theater, to 
which we were conducted by a little ragamuffin. 
Ttiis juvenile guide was polite enough to pretend to 
understand my scant Italian ; and he had apparently 
been able even to acquire a rudimentary ability to 
understand English. I chanced to explain to my 
companions that I had not seen this theater in any 
of my earlier visits to Florence and that it had per- 
haps been newly excavated. The Italian imp, who 
was only a yard or so in front of me, turned suddenly 
as he caught the word new; and with a horrified 
expression he cried out: "Non nuovo, signor; antico, 
molto antico!" 



LATER EUROPEAN MEMORIES 425 

From Florence we went to Venice and thence to 
Budapest and Vienna, arriving in Paris in the fresh 
fairness of the spring, a little after the exposition had 
opened its doors. I had seen the earlier expositions 
in 1867 and 1878, altho I had unfortunately been un- 
able to behold that of 1889. The exhibition of 1900 
was the largest of all, as it was to be the last, the 
next period of eleven years having been allowed 
to pass without another strenuous effort to lure 
the peoples of the world to admire again the un- 
paralleled beauty of Paris and the surpassing skill 
of the French in every department of the show busi- 
ness. The architecture of the monumental entrances 
of the exhibition of 1900 and of the several tem- 
porary edifices was rather flamboyant, as befitted 
a glorified and gigantic fair; and I could not help 
contrasting their elaborate artificiality with the 
chaste severity of classic design which had charac- 
terized our own exhibition of 1893. There was 
truth as well as humor in the remark that Paris 
had revelled in the structural novelty which might 
have been expected in Chicago, whereas Chicago 
had revealed the respect for the noble traditions be- 
queathed to us by the past that might have been 
expected in Paris. 

It has been my fortune to be in the French capital 
at many moments of excitement, to witness the visit 
of Queen Victoria after the Crimean war, to hear 
Thiers assault the empire in 1867, to be present on 
the July day in 1870 when war was declared on 
Prussia and when the streets were thronged with 
vociferous mobs shouting "a Berlin! a Berlin!"; 



426 THESE MANY YEARS 

to be present again six weeks later when the news 
of the defeat at Sedan brought about the downfall 
of the empire and the proclamation of the republic; 
to behold the interminable funeral processions of 
Victor Hugo, in 1884, and of Carnot, in 1894. In 
1900 the excitement was once more intense over the 
Dreyfus case; and the ministry of Waldeck-Rous- 
seau, which was displaying the courage to right the 
grievous wrong done to an innocent man, was in 
imminent danger of falling and perhaps of bringing 
down in its ruins the republic itself. On this occa- 
sion, as on so many others, courage proved to be 
the best policy; and the ministry was able to ride 
out the storm. It is from that moment that the 
political regeneration of France may be dated. 

Coquelin was an intimate friend of Waldeck-Rous- 
seau, as he had been an intimate friend of Gambetta; 
and he, like all the friends of Gambetta, was earnest 
in his insistence upon justice at whatever cost. He 
had the certain conviction that all would go well, 
and he felt free to plan an American trip for the fol- 
lowing season, when he was to join forces with Sarah- 
Bernhardt. 

"She is to play Roxane for me in 'Cyrano de 
Bergerac ' and I am to play Flambeau for her in 
'L'Aiglon' — the part that was originally written 
for me, altho it was created here by Guitry. Then 
I have old Duval in the 'Dame aux Camelias,' as 
usual — a very small part, but I don't mind that, as 
it is a good part, what there is of it." 

I told him I had heard that she intended to ap- 
pear as Hamlet; and I asked what character in 



LATER EUROPEAN MEMORIES 427 

Shakspere's tragedy he proposed to impersonate. 
When he answered that he would have to con- 
tent himself with Polonius, I protested at once, tell- 
ing him that the part was quite unworthy of him, and 
that it was a feebler character even than it seemed, 
being indeed what the French call a false good part — 
a faux bon role. He confessed that he knew this, 
but that Polonius seemed to be the only character 
for him, since he had to appear in every play. 

"Why don't you undertake the Grave-digger?" 
I inquired. "Jefferson has just done it again at an 
all-star benefit performance in New York." 

"The Grave-digger?" he returned. "That's an 
idea! And if Jefferson has been willing to do it, 
I don't see why I shouldn't. I'll look at it." 

When I saw him the next day, I found him quite 
enthusiastic. 

"You were right," he said. "The Grave-digger 
is an admirable character — rich and true. Of 
course, I shall play him — and I think I can make 
something out of him. Can you get me the music of 
his song?" 

I sent to London for the tune which is traditional 
on the English-speaking stage, but Coquelin immedi- 
ately disapproved of it, finding it lacking in character. 

"I want an air which will go with the swing of a 
pickax," he explained. "I must have a tune to be 
punctuated with the blows of the Grave-digger's 
implement, working as he sings." 

He said that he would get one of his musical 
friends to set Shakspere's song for him; and it was 
characteristic of his artistic thoroness that not until 



428 THESE MANY YEARS 

a third tune had been composed for him was he 
satisfied with its rhythm. 

I may note here, since I find I have failed to re- 
mark it earlier, that Coquelin's keen artistic sus- 
ceptibility was illustrated by his possession of three 
distinct methods of delivery, adjusted to the three 
modes of self-expression in which he was incompara- 
ble — acting a character, reciting a monolog, and 
reading a lecture. When he acted a character he 
was completely and wholly the comedian, employ- 
ing accent and look and gesture. When he recited 
a monolog — and it was very largely due to his 
practice and to his precept that the monolog, in 
prose and in verse, became abidingly popular in 
Paris — he ceased to be an actor; he abjured ges- 
ticulation, he spoke quietly as became a gentleman 
in evening dress, and he relied mainly on the mani- 
fold modulations of his voice. When he had a 
lecture to deliver he was simpler still; he sat in his 
chair; he put on his horn spectacles; and he did not 
raise his voice or attempt any dramatic variety of 
intonation. An auditor of one of his lectures would 
never have had occasion to suspect that the reader 
was also the most versatile and the most accom- 
plished of comedians. 

IV 

I crossed again to Europe in the early spring of 
1902, having been invited to deliver three lectures 
on the English drama at the Royal Institution in 
Albemarle Street. I spoke in the little amphi- 



LATER EUROPEAN MEMORIES 429 

theater in which Faraday and Tyndall had made 
some of their most memorable addresses. I stood 
behind the long desk, so to call it, which separated 
the platform from the rising tiers of seats for the 
listeners, and which was fitted with the proper appli- 
ances for the performance of illustrative experiments 
in chemistry and physics. 

After my last lecture, one of my friends at the 
Savile expressed his regret that he had not been 
able to hear me, as his own engagements were likely 
to hold him fast on Saturday afternoons. "In 
fact," he went on, "the last time I was able to go 
to the Royal Institution was a good many years 
ago — and I recall the occasion because I saw Tyn- 
dall do a very curious thing. The long desk was 
cluttered with apparatus and in front of it, in the 
little space close to the first row of seats, there was 
a table with a stand supporting a retort filled with 
a dark liquid, under which a Bunsen burner was 
lighted just before Tyndall came out to begin his 
vivacious talk. I wondered what this retort was 
doing out there, so close to the auditors; and my 
wonder grew as Tyndall went on and on without 
utilizing it or mentioning it. Suddenly, when the 
hour had half elapsed, Tyndall looked up with a 
start of surprise, as tho he had just remembered 
that retort, whereupon he vaulted lightly over the 
desk and turned off the Bunsen burner. Then he 
gave a sigh of relief and walked slowly around 
again to his place on the platform, paying no atten- 
tion to the applause of the spectators of his athletic 
feat. As it happened, TyndalFs assistant was an 



430 THESE MANY YEARS 

old acquaintance of mine. So I sought him out 
after the lecture and asked him if the lecturer had 
really saved our lives by his startling leap over the 
desk to prevent the explosion of the retort. He 
laughed as he told me that there had been no danger, 
since the extra apparatus on that table had been 
arranged on purpose — and Tyndall had been prac- 
tising that vault for at least a week !" 

During this visit to London I ceased to go as often 
to the Savile as I had been in the habit of doing. 
The reason for this neglect of the Savile was that I 
had been elected to the Athenaeum in the spring of 
1901. It was at Locker-Lampson's request that 
Matthew Arnold had proposed me as a member in 
1883; and the waiting-list was then so full that I 
had to bide my turn for eighteen years before my 
name could be considered. My kindly proposer 
had died in the interval, and Austin Dobson served 
as my sponsor. There were already several Amer- 
ican members of the Athenaeum, Henry James, for 
one, but they were all settled in London; and I am 
inclined to believe that I was the first non-resident 
American to be elected. 

It was just before I gave my last lecture at the 
Royal Institution that the Boer war came to an 
end. When the news arrived that peace had at 
last been achieved, the streets of London were filled 
with joyous and noisy throngs, almost as excited 
as those which I had seen in Paris on the day of the 
proclamation of the republic. It was to celebrate 
the happy end of this protracted war in a distant 
continent that King Edward decided to establish 



LATER EUROPEAN MEMORIES 431 

the Order of Merit, to which at first only twelve were 
appointed — three generals, Roberts, Wolseley, 
Kitchener; two admirals, Keppel and Seymour; 
four scientists, Rayleigh, Kelvin, Lister, and Hug- 
gins; two men of letters, Morley and Lecky; and 
one painter, Watts. 

As it happened, most of the appointees to the new 
Order belonged also to the Athenaeum; and in recog- 
nition of the signal honor conferred upon these mem- 
bers, the club departed from its traditions and for 
the first time in its fourscore years of existence it re- 
solved to give a dinner to the Order of Merit. Then 
it was that I found myself fortunate in having been 
elected to the Athenaeum the preceding year; and 
I was fortunate again in being favored by chance 
when there were so many applicants for places at 
the tables that names had to be selected by lot. 
The dinner was given on July 25, and it was at- 
tended by ten out of the twelve distinguished men 
to whom it was given. Lord Avebury (better 
known to most of us as Sir John Lubbock) presided; 
and speeches were made by Roberts and Kitchener, 
Rayleigh, Kelvin, Lister, and Huggins, each re- 
sponding to the toast in his honor, and Admiral 
Seymour spoke for himself and also for Admiral 
Keppel. Arthur Balfour proposed the health of 
the chairman; and the chairman then proposed the 
health of Balfour, whose birthday it happened to 
be. The speaking was perhaps a little ponderous 
at times, and I recall that I liked least of all Lister's 
somewhat self-conscious remarks, and that I relished 
most the straightforward directness of the brief and 



432 THESE MANY YEARS 

soldierly responses of Roberts and Kitchener. As I 
look over the seating plan which I have preserved I 
see that E. A. Abbey and I were the only Americans 
present; and I am reminded by the sight of Kip- 
ling's name that he broke off a chat with me just 
before dinner, saying: "I must go and find some- 
body to introduce me to Kitchener !" It seemed to 
me odd that the laureate of the British Empire 
should not earlier have met the general who had 
done so much to make secure the borders of that 
wide-flung realm. 

I had met Kipling first at the Savile in the sum- 
mer of 1891 when he had recently returned from 
India, and when he was in the first flush of his sudden 
success. At that time it seemed to me that he did 
not feel quite at home in England; and like most of 
the men who have spent their impressionable years 
in outlying parts of the empire, he found it easier 
to be friendly with an American than with the aver- 
age inhabitant of the British Isles. I have often 
observed the fact; — I suppose that this immediate 
fraternizing is due to our possession of the same 
language and of the same traditions, and of our com- 
mon difficulty in narrowing our vision to the affairs 
of the little island set in the silver sea. To the 
American as to the colonial, London may be "the 
power-house of the race" — but it is not the whole 
works. I recall that in 1891 when we were once 
talking about the insularity of the British, Kipling 
said: "Well, I'm not an Englishman, you know; 
I'm a colonial !" a statement that he would possibly 
not have repeated a score of years later. 



LATER EUROPEAN MEMORIES 433 

Of all the Englishmen I have ever known Kipling 
has the most sympathetic understanding of American 
character. He married an American ; he lived for a 
while in the United States; and his intimate ac- 
quaintance with American literature began when he 
was a boy -journalist in India. His friendship is so 
thoro that he has not hesitated more than once to 
point out certain of our less desirable characteristics ; 
and this has sometimes exposed him to the charge 
of unfriendliness. I doubt if we Americans are 
fonder of flattery or more resentful of candid criti- 
cism than the British are or the French or the Ger- 
mans; and our cuticle is not as tender as it was 
before the civil war; but even now we are not as 
thick-skinned as we might be. 

Lovers of poetry are united in holding that its 
appeal is rather to the ear than to the eye. Even if 
we must get our knowledge from the printed page, 
we do not really possess a poem until we have read 
it aloud and made ourselves conscious of its rhyth- 
mical potency. As this is the case, I have been in- 
clined to believe that those lyrics are most likely 
to please our ears which have been composed more 
or less completely in the head of the poet, even if 
they may have been meticulously revised after he 
had put them on paper. I knew that Scott had 
beaten out his ballads as he galloped over the hills 
and that Tennyson had often sung his songs into 
being while walking in the open air. I was confirmed 
in this belief when Kipling dropped into my house 
in New York one day in the nineties and when he 
answered my query as to what he had been at work 



434 THESE MANY YEARS 

on with the information that he had just completed 
a long ballad. I asked to see it. 

"Oh, I can't show it to you now," he explained, 
"for it isn't written down yet. But I've got it all 
in my head and I'll say it to you if you like." 

When I assured him that this was exactly to my 
liking, he began to recite 'McAndrew's Hymn,' 
walking up and down as he spoke the vigorous and 
sonorous lines of that superb story in rime, second 
in Kipling's own verse only to the noble 'Ballad of 
East and West,' and unsurpassed in the work of any 
other contemporary ballad-writer of our language. 
The weighty lines and the picturesque movement of 
the poem lost nothing in the poet's simple delivery. 
When he had made an end, I cried out my admira- 
tion. And then, after my enthusiasm had cooled 
a little, I hesitated a criticism. 

"Are you certain sure that you have all your 
engineering technicalities just right?" I asked. 

"I think so," Kipling replied. "In fact, I'm al- 
most sure. But I'm going to Washington next week 
and your chief engineer, Melville, has promised to 
point out any slips that I may have made." 



It was on my return voyage to New York from 
one of these summer visits to Europe that I had on 
successive nights two dreams so absurd that I have 
remembered them. In the first, I had descended 
into hell, which I found to be a vast region with an 
iron floor and with an iron ceiling, riveted to iron 



LATER EUROPEAN MEMORIES 435 

stanchions, with the hexagonal nuts visible — just 
as they were above the berth in which I was sleeping. 
The atmosphere of this shallow place of departed 
spirits was murky with smoke and there was only 
a dim light. But in the distance I saw a glare, 
toward which I was impelled by an irresistible im- 
pulse. As I came closer I discovered that this light 
proceeded from gas-jets, which I soon perceived to 
be arranged to form flaming letters, flickering and 
flaring with the veering of the wind. When at last 
I stood only a few yards from it, there fell a lull 
and I was able to read the legend written in letters 
of fire. There were only four words: "Keep off the 
grass." And as I had seen this vision in a dream, 
the oddity of it did not strike me until I recalled 
it on waking the next morning. 

In the second of these curious dreams, a little 
more coherent than dreams usually are, I was being 
taken by the younger Dumas to call on the elder 
Dumas. Of course, our conversation was in French; 
and I note this because I am inclined to think it 
very unusual for a man to dream in a foreign tongue. 
What the younger Dumas said to me on the way, 
I never remembered, nor what the elder Dumas said 
when I was presented to him. What alone floated 
in my waking memory was what I had said to the 
man I had come to visit: "Your son is a man of 
talent; he has written the 'Dame aux Camelias.' 
But I am a man of genius ; I have written nothing at 
all!" 

No other dream of mine ever equalled the tri- 
umphant quaintness of these two. As a schoolboy 



436 THESE MANY YEARS 

I used to dream that I had the gift of levitation, that 
is to say, of floating thru the air over the heads 
of my companions. I believe, however, that this 
illusion is not uncommon in boyish dreams; and I 
recall how I regretted in my waking hours that I 
did not really possess this faculty, longing to be able 
to astonish the teachers by hovering lightly and 
lazily over their heads. 

The only dream at all comparable in its comic 
unexpectedness with these two of mine was one 
which came to Elihu Vedder in Capri. He dreamed 
that an American lady, also settled in that lovely 
island, had complained to him of the difficulty of 
washing the gardener's dog to get rid of the ticks in 
his shaggy hide. To this Vedder heard himself 
replying that the difficulty was natural enough, 
since the gardener's dog was a watch-dog, and there- 
fore, of course, it had sixty ticks every second ! 

And since I quoted this pun dreamed by an im- 
aginative artist in Italy I am led to quote another 
pun perpetrated by another imaginative artist when 
he was thoroly wide awake. On one of our voyages 
to Europe we crossed on the Celtic; and the evening 
before we left New York, Oliver Herford called me 
up on the telephone to bid me farewell. He asked 
me the name of the ship that was to bear us away; 
and some imp of the perverse tempted me to say that 
we were going over on the Keltic. 

"Don't say that," was Herford's telephonic re- 
sponse; "or you will have a hard C all the way 
over!" 

I quoted this once to a Scotch friend who capped 



LATER EUROPEAN MEMORIES 437 

it with this : A distinguished English scientist of the 
last generation did not reserve all his imagination 
for his investigation into the secrets of nature. He 
utilized some of it to invent marvellous chapters 
from his own biography; and on one occasion when 
he had spun an unusually unbelievable yarn with 
himself in the center of the coil, the friend to whom 
he had made this extraordinary confession, looked 
him in the eye with the direct question: "Clifford, 
do you mean to tell me that all this really occurred 
to you?" 

And the man of science answered with a swift 
smile: "Yes; it just occurred to me!" 



CHAPTER XIX 
A SEXAGENARIAN RETROSPECT 



IN preparation for the writing of these rambling 
recollections of a life now stretching out toward 
the allotted threescore years and ten, I have 
diligently scanned every page of every one of the 
series of little diaries in which for forty years and 
more I have summarily jotted down, day after day, 
a hasty record of books read, plays witnessed, things 
done, and persons seen. I have never had the 
patient application demanded by the more ambi- 
tious journal, with its attempt to preserve in minute 
detail the evanescent impressions of the moment, 
and with its incessant effort to retain a clear echo 
of the clever talk that might otherwise go in one 
ear and out of the other. But I have been able to 
overcome my customary inertia once in every 
twenty-four hours and to fix a few of the facts of 
the daily routine of existence; and these entries, 
stripped of all color and all movement, implacably 
impersonal, mere inert and faded and truncated 
memorandums, are yet possessed of the power to 
touch forgotten springs and to evoke swift visions 
of events utterly obliterated from all remembrance. 
We are told that in the course of seven years the 
body undergoes a complete transformation of its 

438 



A SEXAGENARIAN RETROSPECT 439 

constituents; and we cannot doubt that the mind 
also makes itself over and not only rids itself of 
many insignificant things that it has been carrying, 
but also changes itself more or less, so that we may 
not easily perceive the evolution of any one of its 
later stages from any one of the earlier. As I res- 
olutely turned leaf after leaf of the oldest of these 
tiny volumes, I found myself taken back across the 
yawning gulf of years and forced to gaze into the 
face of the unformed lad I was when I started to 
keep track of my daily doings. The boy is father 
to the man, beyond all question; nevertheless, this 
elderly reader did not readily recognize the features 
of his juvenile ancestor. That distant progenitor 
seemed to him a very different person, with tastes 
that he had almost forgotten and with experiences 
that he had allowed to slip blankly into oblivion. 

Of course, I could recall my changes of domicile 
and the successive homes we had occupied. But I 
found entries proving that men had come to my 
house whose names mean nothing to me now and 
whose faces I cannot call up. Other entries in- 
formed me that I had seen plays which I had for- 
gotten totally and which I had been regretting that 
I had never seen — plays of Moliere, for example, 
the performance of which had made no deposit on 
my memory, in spite of my early and abiding inter- 
est in the greatest of comic dramatists. And there 
were books I had read, the titles of which had a 
strange unfamiliarity, even tho the record might 
reveal also the departed fact that I had reviewed 
them once upon a time. On the other hand, there 



440 THESE MANY YEARS 

were a few long-distant happenings which had kept 
their color and their movement and which sprang 
back to life, swift and sharp in outline as soon as 
my eyes fell upon the half-dozen abbreviated words 
of the contemporary entry. Memory is indeed a 
frolicsome sprite who delights in playing pantomime 
tricks upon us; and sometimes she seems to be a 
little lacking in the sense of values, keeping tight 
hold of many things that are worthless and letting 
slip more that demand insistently to be retained. 

As I have noted, I had not forgotten our successive 
migrations, and yet I have failed to set down in these 
pages an incident connected with one of these re- 
movals. When Columbia College was about to 
depart from Madison Avenue and Forty-ninth 
Street, to expand itself leisurely in its newly acquired 
property on Morningside Heights, we sold our house 
on Eighteenth Street between Fourth Avenue and 
Irving Place and bought one on the corner of West 
End Avenue and Ninety-third Street. After we 
were settled in this new home, we chose an after- 
noon when we invited our friends to drop in for a 
cup of tea. The house bore a number on the avenue, 
but its entrance was around the corner on the side 
street; and naturally enough not a few of our 
visitors, unfamiliar with our abode, rang the bell of 
the dwelling next to ours on the avenue, to the in- 
creasing annoyance of the Irish maid servant, who 
was continually called from her own work to de- 
clare that hers was not the door of our residence. 
After this had happened perhaps a dozen times, 
there came a final ring and a final inquiry as to 



A SEXAGENARIAN RETROSPECT 441 

whether this was our house. By this time her 
patience was quite worn out and she answered 
petulantly: "It's next door, I tell ye — round the 
corner there. I should think ye'd know that by 
this time!" 



II 

It was in this house in West End Avenue that I 
received one morning, in the first week of January, 
1907, a letter from M. Jules Jusserand, ambassador 
of the French Republic and historian of English 
literature, informing me that I had been decorated 
with the cross of the Legion of Honor. And it was 
in this house a few months earlier that the meeting 
had been held which resulted in the establishment of 
the Simplified Spelling Board, the first solidly sup- 
ported organization to undertake the formidable 
task of arousing the two peoples who have English 
for their mother tongue to admit the necessity of 
removing the more obvious anomalies of our orthog- 
raphy, if our speech is to be made fit for service as 
a world-language. There had been earlier not a few 
sporadic efforts on the part of spelling-reform associa- 
tions and of the philological societies of Great Britain 
and the United States, but these had accomplished 
little or nothing, partly because the appeal they 
put forth was a little too academic, and partly be- 
cause they were without funds sufficient for the pro- 
longed propaganda necessary to awaken attention 
and to overcome prejudice. Andrew Carnegie had 
agreed to sustain our movement for three years, if 



442 THESE MANY YEARS 

we could secure a certain number of pledges of sup- 
port from men of prominence, and if we could sub- 
mit a plan of campaign which approved itself to his 
shrewd business sense. 

At the gathering at my house we outlined our 
proposals, and when these were laid before Mr. Car- 
negie they seemed to him feasible. We who had 
thus joined together were encouraged to add to 
our number and to organize formally as the Simpli- 
fied Spelling Board. As soon as we ventured out 
into the open with our recommendations for making 
English orthography simpler to use and easier to 
acquire both by children and by foreigners, it was 
made a matter of reproach to us that we were "a 
self-appointed body" — a reproach which would lie 
also against every public-spirited organization in 
every English-speaking community. Whenever a 
wrong needs to be righted or an improvement needs 
to be advocated, it is customary for a few of those 
most ardently interested to band together in a body 
to accomplish the end in view. This is what the anti- 
slavery men had done, the civil-service reformers, 
the supporters also of international copyright, the 
founders of the Sanitary Commission and of the Red 
Cross Society. It is the habit of our race to rely 
on individual initiative and on voluntary associa- 
tions, and those who saw fit to find fault with us for 
being self-appointed, thereby disclosed their failure to 
understand one of the distinguishing characteristics 
of our stock. 

Yet I venture to think that the membership of the 
Simplified Spelling Board when we were at last 



A SEXAGENARIAN RETROSPECT 443 

ready to begin the work of enlightenment and of 
persuasion, did not greatly differ from that which a 
governmental commission would have had if it had 
been judiciously selected. Any body charged with 
the duty of suggesting improvements in orthog- 
raphy ought to number among its members, first of 
all linguistic scholars, experts in the history of the 
language; second, men of letters, experts in the 
use of the language; and third, men of affairs, repre- 
senting the public at large who are the makers 
of the language. The Simplified Spelling Board 
enrolled as representatives of the first group not 
only professors of English in leading universities 
but also the editors of every important dictionary 
of the English language — in the United States 
Webster's, the Century, and the Standard; in Great 
Britain the Oxford, the Etymological, and the 
Dialect. As representatives of the second group 
we had with us at the beginning Mark Twain, 
R. W. Gilder, Andrew D. White, T. W. Higginson, 
and William James, and we have since enlisted the 
assistance of John Burroughs and G. W. Cable. 
The representatives of the third group included pub- 
lishers, editors, bank presidents, judges, and heads 
of leading universities. After a year as chairman, 
I withdrew in favor of Professor Lounsbury of Yale, 
who became the first president of the Board — to 
be succeeded in time by Professor Grandgent of 
Harvard. 

We called ourselves the Simplified Spelling Board 
because we did not wish to be confounded with the 
more radical advocates of "fonetic reform," and 



444 THESE MANY YEARS 

because we expected at first to confine our efforts to 
the acceleration of that process of simplification by 
the casting out of needless letters which had given 
us sun instead of sunne, and economic instead of 
ceconomicke — a process constantly observable in 
the history of the language, and aided by Noah 
Webster when he preferred wagon and almanac to 
the waggon and almanack still acceptable to our 
kin across the sea. We knew we were enlisted for 
a long campaign and we began by asking very little. 
In fact, we almost adopted as a motto Sainte-Beuve's 
saying that "orthography is like society; it will 
never be entirely reformed, but we can at least make 
it less vicious." We wanted first of all to disestab- 
lish the superstition that English spelling had been 
divinely ordained, and that there was a final stand- 
ard, to tamper with which was high treason if not 
sacrilege. It was easy for us to show that there 
has always existed room for the right of private 
judgment. Which is the proper orthography, gipsy 
or gypsy? controller or comptroller? checque or cheque 
or check? rhyme or ryme or rime? Who shall de- 
cide when dictionaries disagree? 

We took advantage of these accepted variations, 
recorded in long columns at the back of most Ameri- 
can dictionaries; and we began by issuing a list of 
three hundred words already spelled in two or more 
ways, with the suggestion that there would be ad- 
vantage in always using the shortest and simplest 
form. In this first list we did not insert a single 
simplification of our own invention; and yet even 
in this modest beginning we could not help seeming 



A SEXAGENARIAN RETROSPECT 445 

to be radical since we included twelve rather start- 
ling simplifications recommended several years earlier 
by the National Educational Association. Among 
these were tho and altho, thoro and thoroly, thru and 
thruout. There was no doubt that some of these 
twelve truncated spellings looked very strange — 
more especially thru. It is true that those readers 
who were familiar with the final edition of Tennyson 
(a devoted spelling reformer) might have noted that 
this poet always insisted on tho 9 and altho 9 and that 
he always abbreviated through into thro\ which is 
not as satisfactory phonetically as thru. It was 
generally assumed that the Simplified Spelling Board 
was responsible for thru, which was held up to scorn 
as a horrible example of orthographic mayhem. I 
confess that at first I myself found thru a little diffi- 
cult to swallow; but after a while I became recon- 
ciled to it; in fact I soon discovered that there was 
a tactical advantage in putting forth one extreme 
and violent simplification to draw the enemy's fire 
in concentrated volleys. And I was amused to see 
that thru began promptly to win the favor of adver- 
tisers (those masters of simple English), probably 
because of its appealing brevity. 

When President Roosevelt became a member of 
the Board and issued his order to the Public Printer 
to adopt our recommendations, then the storm 
broke and the air was filled with the shrieks of the 
wounded and the groans of the dying. As a natural 
result of the shouting and the tumult, attention 
was called to the lamentable condition of English 
orthography; and we began to win adherents in 



446 THESE MANY YEARS 

increasing numbers. What we had to overcome 
was ignorance and the prejudice that is born of igno- 
rance; and our weapon was therefore not argument 
but information. Our bitterest opponents were 
often men of letters ; and we had to devote ourselves 
to the "gradual diffusion of intelligence among 
the educated classes," to use Lounsbury's pertinent 
phrase. 

Lord Morley uttered a shrewd warning when he 
asserted that "nearly all lovers of improvement are 
apt, in the heat of a generous enthusiasm, to forget 
that if all the world were ready to embrace their 
cause, their improvement could hardly be needed." 
We have not yet won over all the world to embrace 
our cause; but we have diffused information. The 
more vociferous of our earlier opponents have now 
shrunk into comparative silence, as tho no longer 
willing to expose their naked prejudices to the public 
gaze. What we have still to do is to overcome the 
mighty force of inertia and to arouse the uninter- 
ested from their lethargic willingness to let ill enough 
alone and from their inveterate unwillingness to be 
bothered by any questioning of their indurated 
habits. On the whole we are greatly encouraged, 
since our progress in reaching the ear of the average 
man has been far swifter than the most sanguine 
of us dared to hope when the Simplified Spelling 
Board came into existence. Many of those who 
themselves refuse to adopt any of the shorter spell- 
ings advocated by us are yet perfectly willing that 
their children shall use simpler forms. Our main 
effort is now directed toward teachers, who are best 



A SEXAGENARIAN RETROSPECT 447 

aware of the illogic of the spelling-book and of the 
pitiful waste of time caused by its cumbrous ab- 
surdities. If we can only get at the young while 
they are yet plastic we have reason to feel confident 
that the next generation will be ready for a revision 
of English orthography far more radical than any 
we dare to urge to-day. 

Ill 

It is with undeniable gratification that I can look 
back upon the labors of the later Simplified Spelling 
Board and of the earlier Copyright League; and 
it is a privilege for me to believe that I had a share, 
however slight, in the starting of these useful organ- 
izations and in their long-continued activities. And 
I can take pride also in my membership in two other 
societies, one of them selected out of the other and 
both of them free from the reproach of being " self- 
appointed." At its annual meeting in 1898 the 
American Social Science Association elected one 
hundred representatives of the allied arts — men of 
letters, painters, sculptors, architects, and com- 
posers — to constitute a National Institute of Arts 
and Letters; and as I chanced to be one of those 
thus chosen I was enabled to take part in the organ- 
ization of this new body and in the slow expansion 
of its membership to two hundred and fifty. Our 
beginnings were modest; and our earlier meetings 
for the reading and discussion of papers pertinent 
to our several callings were only sparsely attended. 
Yet the National Institute gained strength year by 



448 THESE MANY YEARS 

year, until at last in 1904 it felt itself able to under- 
take what had been a chief purpose of its founders — 
the creation (inside the Institute) of an Academy 
which should band together and bring into more 
intimate association the senior practitioners of the 
several arts. 

As I had nothing to do with the method whereby 
the earliest members of this Academy were to be 
chosen, I feel free to express the opinion that it was 
most ingeniously devised, in that it resulted in the 
selection of a preliminary group of men whose title 
to be thus picked out was beyond dispute; and it 
achieved the further purpose of relieving every 
academician from any suggestion of self-selection. 
The National Institute decided to begin by choosing 
seven of its members to form the nucleus of the 
future Academy; and the ballots revealed that this 
duty had been accomplished with inexpugnable 
judgment. 

The seven original members of the American 
Academy of Arts and Letters were Ho wells, Saint- 
Gaudens, Stedman, La Farge, Mark Twain, John 
Hay, and Edward MacDowell — a sculptor, a 
painter, a composer, and four men of letters. These 
seven were empowered to elect eight more; and the 
fifteen were to add five. Then the twenty thus 
chosen were to select another ten, making thirty 
in all, whereupon the Academy was to consider it- 
self constituted and at liberty to begin an inde- 
pendent life, with its own constitution and its own 
officers, and with the right not only to fill all va- 
cancies but also to raise the number of its members 



A SEXAGENARIAN RETROSPECT 449 

whenever it might see fit. And I may note that in 
time it decided to enlarge itself to fifty, choosing the 
additional members at intervals and only after most 
careful consideration. It also kept its ranks full by 
electing new members to take the place of those 
removed by death; and thus it was that in the course 
of time I was promoted, being the fifty-second 
member elected to the Academy. 

It was intended always to keep the relation of 
the Academy to the Institute as close as possible. 
The Academy was a senate, elected out of the lower 
house, and retaining membership in that house. To 
emphasize and to make evident this solidarity of 
aim, the two bodies hold annual joint sessions, the 
first in Washington, the third in Philadelphia, the 
fifth in Chicago, and the seventh in Boston, the al- 
ternate meetings always taking place in New York. 
At the sixth joint session in New York, in 1914, we 
were honored by the presence of M. Brieux, as a 
special delegate of the French Academy, charged 
to bring us its fraternal greetings and conveying 
also a letter from Poincare, President of France 
and member of the French Academy, to Woodrow 
Wilson, President of the United States and member 
of the American Academy. 

The National Institute annually awards a gold 
medal (designed by one of its members) for excellence 
in one of the arts, each of these taking its turn in a 
cycle of seven years. This medal was voted in turn 
to James Ford Rhodes for history, to Augustus 
Saint-Gaudens for sculpture, and to James Whit- 
comb Riley for poetry. As I had been elected presi- 



450 THESE MANY YEARS 

dent of the Institute in 1912, and again in 1913, 
I had the privilege of presenting this prize to William 
R. Mead for architecture and to Augustus Thomas 
for drama. It has since been given to John S. Sar- 
gent for painting, to Howells for fiction, and to 
John Burroughs for the essay. 

IV 

It is one of the pleasant privileges of advancing 
years to look back and compare the present with 
the immediate past, and to perceive the alterations, 
social as well as physical, which have taken place 
decade after decade. At times some of these 
changes in national temper and in national tendencies 
may seem to an aging man to disclose a deteriora- 
tion in the taste of the American people; but to a 
sexagenarian who haply retains a little of the spirit 
of youth most of them approve themselves. It 
appears to me that the organization of a National 
Institute of Arts and Letters and the ensuing crea- 
tion of an Academy would not have been possible 
in the United States in the mid-years of the nine- 
teenth century. Few would be so rash as to main- 
tain that any of the arts — excepting perhaps the 
art of letters — flourished in America before the 
civil war or that we awoke to an appreciation of our 
own artistic bareness until the centenary exhibition 
of 1876. 

Then it was that an enforced comparison with 
other nations revealed to us our pitiful penury and 
aroused in us a recognition of the value of the arts 



A SEXAGENARIAN RETROSPECT 451 

to a people otherwise as idealistic as ours. The 
results of this awakening were abundantly visible 
at the Columbian exhibition, held only seventeen 
years later. We could gage the progress we had 
made when we set over against the haphazard 
planning and the uninspired building at Philadel- 
phia the scientific certainty of the scheme and the 
artistic fitness of the architecture at Chicago. The 
white city on the shore of Lake Michigan left in the 
memory of all who had the good fortune to behold 
it an unforgettable vision of power and grace and 
charm. It is perhaps in architecture that our 
artistic advance is most undeniable; and this is 
natural enough, since this is a new country with 
constantly expanding needs which compel us to 
incessant construction, whereas new edifices of signal 
importance are relatively infrequent in the capitals 
of Europe, where the fortunate inhabitants have 
inherited from former generations most of their 
necessary buildings. As a direct result of our inde- 
fatigable enterprise architecture is a living art here 
in the United States and its practitioners are com- 
pelled to a resolute grapple with problems more or 
less peculiar to American conditions — problems for 
which they are finding solutions increasingly satis- 
factory. Our public buildings, national and State 
and municipal, are no longer uncouth and amor- 
phous, like the unspeakable post-office in New 
York. No more are our universities to be housed 
in fortuitously unrelated halls in a conflicting heter- 
ogeny of styles. The dignified assembly of admirably 
adjusted buildings in which Columbia has sheltered 



452 THESE MANY YEARS 

itself on Morningside Heights is only one illustration 
of the new spirit which now animates the American 
people. 

Perhaps even more significant is the beauty which 
is now being bestowed upon edifices so purely utili- 
tarian as banks, office-buildings, factories, and rail- 
road-stations. Not only are the new terminals in 
New York, in Washington, and in other American 
cities more stately and more sumptuous than those 
which adorn any of the capitals of Europe, but they 
are also scrupulously free from the piebald advertise- 
ments which disfigure the terminals in most foreign 
countries — even in France, where we are wont to 
expect the final refinement of good taste. This 
refusal of the certain and ample revenue to be 
derived from the advertiser's artful aid is added 
evidence that the dollar is not nearly so almighty 
over us as alien critics of our civilization have often 
asserted. 

No less significant is the growing custom of call- 
ing upon the mural painter and the sculptor to work 
in alliance with the architect, in accord with the 
noble example set by the Chicago exhibition. Here 
again we find ourselves in generous rivalry with 
France, bland mother of the arts, and far in advance 
over Germany and Great Britain. These things 
may be taken to show that we have at last discovered 
that art is worth while; and they show this even 
more emphatically than the superb expansion of 
the many museums in which our cities are now 
garnering the best that the past has bequeathed 
to us and the most beautiful that the present is 



A SEXAGENARIAN RETROSPECT 453 

creating. There is individuality also in our stained 
glass, in our pottery and favrile glass, in our book- 
binding and in our wrought iron. In these ancillary 
arts we cannot fail to see something of the same 
vitality which is exuberant in architecture. In- 
deed, it is this sense of fresh endeavor and of inge- 
nious experimentation which is most encouraging. 
This vitality of the various arts, major and minor, 
moved an English decorator, resident in the United 
States, to confess to me once that so long as he 
could not be a contemporary of Phidias in Athens 
or of Raphael in Rome, he was glad to be living 
in New York at the end of the nineteenth century. 



In this outflowering of the arts here in America 
in the final decades of the nineteenth century and 
in the opening decades of the twentieth, there is no 
wilful effort for a new departure, no denial of the 
traditions of the past, no freakish insistence on 
being novel at any cost. Rather is there a full 
recognition of the fact that altho this may be a new 
country its population is truly the heir of the ages, 
privileged to profit by the best that has been achieved 
in other lands and in other days. Yet in the evi- 
dences of our artistic advance there is also, or so at 
least it seems to me, a note of our own, audi- 
ble enough, even if difficult to define with precision. 
Especially significant is the comparatively recent 
disappearance of colonialism, of that servile def- 



454 THESE MANY YEARS 

erence to the mother country, which was so obvi- 
ous in our attitude a century ago. 

Even in literature we are far less dependent on 
Great Britain than we were before the passage of 
the International Copyright act removed the pre- 
mium of cheapness which tended to force second-rate 
British fiction into an exaggerated circulation in 
the United States. The literature of the English 
language is still what it always has been and what 
it always will be, one and indivisible; and even if 
the British branch of it may be more important 
than the American branch, our native authors are 
now dealing directly with our own life and are en- 
gaged in revealing us to ourselves. Essential Ameri- 
canism, the imaginative energy of the people, may 
not yet have expressed itself in books, in prose or 
in poetry, in fiction or in the drama, as amply as 
in more material things, in our inventions, in the 
best of our superb bridges, for example, in our noble 
railroad-stations, and in our public parks. Yet we 
have no real reason to be dissatisfied with our con- 
tribution to the literature of the language, since it has 
recorded not inadequately our aspirations and our 
strivings, and since at least half-a-dozen of our au- 
thors have succeeded in winning a reputation in in- 
ternational competition outside the confines of the 
English language. 

In no one of the allied arts is the improvement 
more obvious to any one whose memory goes back 
for half-a-century than in the drama — even if this 
assertion must not be taken to imply that we have 
now an abundance of native plays as veracious and 



A SEXAGENARIAN RETROSPECT 455 

as robust as we could desire. We may be without 
a group of dramatists able to withstand comparison 
with the best of those who continue to maintain the 
primacy of the French in the field of play-making. 
The average American play may be none too good 
to-day — indeed, I can recall no period in all the 
long history of the drama when the average play 
was even tolerably good — but in the middle years 
of the nineteenth century the average American play 
was pitiably feeble, fumbling in craftsmanship, 
empty of purpose, and devoid of sincerity. Further- 
more, it was then likely to be deadly dull — dull 
beyond any experience possible to-day; and a comic 
paper of that departed epoch once expressed a well- 
founded dread when it represented a dramatic critic 
after dinner ordering a second cup of coffee and 
saying: "Make it strong — for I'm going to see an 
American play to-night, and I must keep awake 
somehow !" 

Thin and weak as American plays were then, 
they were only a little thinner and a little weaker 
than the British plays of the same period. The 
main reliance of the London managers was upon 
slovenly adaptations from the French, in which con- 
tinental plots were distorted into external con- 
formity with insular social conventions; and these 
misleading transmogrifications of Parisian pieces 
were freely imported by our managers, under the 
lead of Lester Wallack. If these plays were hope- 
lessly insincere as pictures of life in London, they 
seemed even more absurdly fantastic when per- 
formed in New York. From 1825 to 1875 the 



456 THESE MANY YEARS 

English-speaking stage was a realm of unreality on 
both sides of the Atlantic. At last the right of the 
alien author to control his own work began to be 
recognized by law both in Great Britain and in the 
United States; and as a result the best foreign 
plays were thereafter presented in translation, re- 
taining their full local color and their original ve- 
racity. Then the playwrights of our own language, 
relieved from unfair competition with the venders of 
stolen goods, speedily multiplied in number and 
sought to deal honestly with the conditions of life in 
their own communities. In time plays originally 
written in English were actually exported; Bronson 
Howard's 'Saratoga,' which had been successful in 
London in a British adaptation called 'Brighton,' 
was performed in Berlin; Gillette's 'Secret Service' 
was presented in France, and Clyde Fitch's 'Truth' 
in Italy and in Germany. To-day a piece which 
has pleased in New York is almost as likely to be 
taken to London as a piece which has pleased in 
London is likely to be taken to New York. 

This exporting of American plays to the mother 
country is not yet quite so frequent as the importa- 
tion of British plays to America, partly because the 
old colonial habit of deference to the mother country 
still survives altho diminished in strength; and 
partly because we have developed here in the United 
States only one or two dramatists able to hold their 
own in rivalry with the foremost of the contemporary 
dramatists of Great Britain. Perhaps it is proper 
also to suggest a third reason, which is that the Ameri- 
can playgoing public, compounded of many simples, 



A SEXAGENARIAN RETROSPECT 457 

is cosmopolitan in its tastes and eager to welcome 
the best which can be borrowed from any other 
country, whereas the British are still more or less 
insular in their likings with a persevering preference 
for the plays which at least pretend to mirror their 
own manners and customs. 

The more accurately and more intimately an 
author deals with the social organization of his own 
people and of his own epoch, the more searchingly he 
presents the special problems which his country- 
men are facing, the less likely is his play to win the 
approval of the friendly alien not necessarily inter- 
ested in these local questions. No illustration of 
this could be more significant than the fact that the 
finest comedy of the nineteenth century, the c Gendre 
de M. Poirier' of Augier and Sandeau, has never 
achieved any permanent popularity outside of its 
native language; it is too intensely French in its 
atmosphere to be widely interesting or even to 
be adequately understood, beyond the borders of 
France itself. Now, as it happens, one of the most 
hopeful signs of a genuine dramatic growth here in 
the United States is that the more promising of the 
younger American playwrights are seeking to set 
on the stage the life that seethes about them, clamor- 
ing for interpretation. The 'Dame aux Camelias' 
and the 'Second Mrs. Tanqueray,' 'Magda' and 
'Truth/ have heroines whose appeal is to the emo- 
tions common to all of us who are more or less 
sophisticated by occidental civilization, whereas 
pieces like 'Alabama,' the 'Warrens of Virginia,' 
and even 'Shore Acres,' relying for their power to 



458 THESE MANY YEARS 

please not so much upon plot or passion as upon their 
gentler evocation of an atmosphere peculiar to a 
special time and a special place, cannot expect to 
find an equal favor in the eyes of those who have 
never breathed that air and cannot recognize its 
balmy odors. 

It is true that we are still awaiting that porten- 
tous entity — The Great American Play — just as 
we are also not yet able to "point with pride" to 
The Great American Novel. It may be doubted 
whether our kin across the sea are able to declare 
indisputably which is The Great British Novel, 
altho their branch of our common literature has been 
adorned by a host of novelists who may fairly be 
called great. In our branch of the literature of the 
language we have perhaps half-a-dozen tellers of 
tales w r hose greatness is acknowledged — Cooper 
and Poe and Hawthorne, Howells and Mark Twain. 
In the drama we have not as yet any outstanding 
figures worthy to be set by the side of these mas- 
ters of fiction. Nevertheless, the outlook is not dis- 
couraging; we have at least the luxuriant under- 
growth out of which and above which we may 
hope at any moment to perceive a tall tree towering 
loftily. And the outlook is most encouraging to 
any one who can recall the arid desert of the Ameri- 
can drama in the third quarter of the nineteenth 
century. 



A SEXAGENARIAN RETROSPECT 459 



VI 

As I scanned the long record of the books I read 
in the distant years of my youth, I found myself 
reminded once more that I had been fortunately 
able to follow the entire career of men of letters 
now recognized as masters. I have told elsewhere 
how I sought out the dingy office in an obscure lane 
where I could procure the back numbers of the 
weekly London, and so possess myself of the suc- 
cessive stories which were to make up the 'New 
Arabian Nights' of the then unknown Stevenson; 
and in like manner I haunted the early footsteps of 
Maupassant, turning over the smirched issues of 
the daily Gil Bias to spy out the brief tales which 
Maupassant warranted with his own signature or 
with the pen-name he affected in that apprentice 
period, "Maufrigneuse." Thus it was that I was 
a spectator of the earlier appearances of Daudet and 
of Zola, of Brunetiere and Lemaitre, of Austin Dob- 
son and of Andrew Lang, of Henry James and of 
Howells. And it is because I had thus discovered 
the signal advantage of keeping step with an author 
as he marched forward to his goal with a tread which 
became firmer and firmer, that I was early impressed 
by the importance of always studying the mightier 
masters, Moliere and Shakspere, in the strict chrono- 
logical sequence of their works, a method which seems 
to me absolutely indispensable to a proper estimate 
of the ultimate value of their indisputable master- 
pieces. 



460 THESE MANY YEARS 

My record of books read in the years that are 
gone drew my attention to the pitiable fading away 
of the reputations of novelists popular enough in 
those distant days. It is only two or three decades 
since the editors of widely circulated periodicals 
in London and in New York were glad to welcome 
to their pages the innocuous tho artificial traveller's 
tales of William Black; and to-day when I chance 
to cite the name of the author of the 'Strange Ad- 
ventures of a Phaeton ' to young men of literary taste 
and of literary aspiration I evoke only the blank 
stare of ignorance. The generation now coming 
forward knows nought of Black; and it cares as little 
for Walter Besant, whose cheerful stories used to 
fellowship with Black's, month after month, and 
week after week. Time was when the serial enigmas 
of Wilkie Collins kept us guessing and when the 
alluring but lurid unveracities of Ouida kept us 
sleepless. Time was, time is, and time will be; and 
the writers of "best sellers" have their fates, like 
other men. Where are the novels of yesteryear? 
In what dim limbo of deserted circulating libraries 
do they now repose unmolested, with the dust thick- 
ening upon their heads ? 

All the ancient shrines are not deserted to-day 
nor are all the idols abandoned to solitary neglect. 
In the catalogs that settle down on my library- 
table like autumn leaves, I discover that hopeful 
venders are proffering complete sets of Marryat, 
of Lever, and of Charles Reade. But all true book- 
lovers know that complete sets are for external use 
only; they are cenotaphs into which their owners 



A SEXAGENARIAN RETROSPECT 461 

rarely penetrate; and they stand erect with all the 
stately chill of a mausoleum. Even the most self- 
satisfied of authors can have no hope of carrying 
his complete works down with him to posterity; 
that narrow trail has no room for a baggage-wagon; 
and he is lucky if he may bear along the salvage that 
he can stow away in the saddle-bag. Indeed he has 
no reason to be dissatisfied if the wallet of time is 
thinly laden with but a single volume if only that 
one book is as eternally captivating as 'Robinson 
Crusoe.' 

"And the moral of that is" that the popular story- 
tellers of to-day, the best sellers of the second dec- 
ade of the twentieth century, must be prepared for 
the same sad fate. A reputation may rise steadily 
during a writer's lifetime and swiftly after his death 
when his contemporaries become unexpectedly con- 
scious of their loss; and then it is certain to decline 
in the ensuing years, even if it may recover itself 
after time has winnowed the works that supported 
it, and selected from out of the mass the two or 
three masterpieces best fitted to buttress a departed 
celebrity. It may be doubted whether George Eliot 
is not now being weighed in the balance of posterity 
with no certainty that she will preserve her lofty 
position as the third in the triumvirate with Dickens 
and Thackeray. Sidney Lanier's series of lectures 
on the 'English Novel,' in which he held all her great 
predecessors to be merely trail-breakers, existing only 
to make smooth her triumphant arrival, seems to 
some of us to-day sadly one-sided, altho less than 
twoscore years have elapsed since its publication. 



462 THESE MANY YEARS 

Yet if George Eliot of the masculine mind is in a 
perilous predicament, we may be assured that the 
gulf of oblivion is yawning grimly before the feet 
of most of those whose popularity to-day is* less 
solidly established than was hers in her own genera- 
tion. 



VII 

At last I come to the end of my agreeable task of 
celebrating myself and of talking about myself to 
my heart's content. There are many other recollec- 
tions that I could have dwelt upon and that I have 
decided to omit from these pages. I have chosen 
to set down here only the pleasanter memories of 
my journey thru life; and it has seemed wisest for 
me to pass over those that were not so pleasant, and 
not even to hint at those which were bitter. Our 
joys we share with acquaintances of the moment, 
but our sorrows are rarely to be confided even to 
friends of long standing; they are for ourselves alone, 
and we must bear them as best we can. Many joys 
have been mine, even if they were never violent; 
and my sorrows have been fewer than fall to the lot 
of most men. As it has been my good fortune to 
find myself "a man of cheerful yesterdays and of 
confident to-morrows," it has been less difficult 
for me than for many another to take the world 
for what it was and to make the best of things such 
as they are. 

If there is any truth in the cynical saying that a 
pessimist is a man who has just come from a long 



A SEXAGENARIAN RETROSPECT 463 

conversation with an optimist, then I can only- 
fear that the readers of this record had better be- 
gin at once to pray for deliverance from the pangs of 
pessimism. I am drawing to the end of my days in 
a position very different from that in which I stood 
when I attained to man's estate; and few things 
would have more astonished me than if I could have 
foreseen then where I should be now. No doubt 
it was lucky for me that I could have no prophetic 
vision of my future situation; and no doubt again 
it is lucky for me that I was born contented as well 
as cheerful. No one has any reason to be discon- 
tented who finds himself as I do, engaged in work 
that he enjoys, in congenial surroundings with con- 
genial associates — work for which he is fairly well 
paid and with the result of which he is not altogether 
dissatisfied. 



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